ReflectAI
An AI journaling app. You write one entry a day and rate how happy you felt from 1 to 10. At the end of each month, and each year, Claude writes you a report on the patterns in what you wrote, with specific observations drawn from your own entries rather than generic wellness advice.
Live at reflectai.net. I wrote about building it here: How I built ReflectAI, an AI journaling app.
Features
- Calendar-based journal: one entry per day, organized by date
- Happiness tracking: a 1–10 score on every entry
- Monthly and yearly reports: Claude identifies patterns, cites specific entries and suggests next steps; reports are saved so you can look back on them
- Accounts: email and password sign-in with email verification, plus optional Google sign-in
Privacy and safety
- Every read and write is scoped to the signed-in user at the storage layer, so an entry ID or date alone is never enough to reach someone's data.
- The database allows only one entry per user per day.
- Journal text is treated as untrusted input when it's sent to the model: entries are wrapped in delimiter tags, the model is told to ignore any instructions inside them, and responses are parsed as structured JSON.
Stack
- Frontend: React 18, TypeScript, Vite, Wouter, TanStack Query, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui
- Backend: Express, TypeScript
- Database: PostgreSQL with Drizzle ORM
- Auth: Better Auth (self-hosted), bridged to local user records by verified email
- AI: Anthropic Claude
- Hosting: Railway
Running locally
npm install- Set environment variables (e.g. in a
.env file):
DATABASE_URL: Postgres connection stringBETTER_AUTH_SECRET and BETTER_AUTH_URL: Better Auth settingsANTHROPIC_API_KEY: for reportsRESEND_API_KEY and EMAIL_FROM: for verification and password-reset emailsGOOGLE_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET: optional, enables Google sign-in
npm run db:push to create the tablesnpm run dev, then open http://localhost:5000
To build and run for production: npm run build, then npm start.
Related
- journal-mcp-server: a standalone reference version of the MCP server that lets Claude read and write ReflectAI journal entries.
License
MIT
