I stopped.

The need

Every object became a decision.

After severe burnout and depression, I had been carrying more responsibility than I had the capacity to hold. For a long time, I felt responsible for the practical needs of my household—and for the decisions and emotions surrounding them.

Eventually, I could not make one more decision. I did not gradually become less productive. I stopped.

My home became neglected and filled with clutter. Not because I did not care. I cared deeply. But every object seemed to hold another decision: where it belonged, what should happen next, and whether touching it would open an even larger task.

“We are starting here. This is the one thing we are doing.”

That was the kind of help I needed. The systems meant to help usually handed the responsibility back to me. They expected me to make the plan, organize the work, maintain the routine, and motivate everyone—including myself—to follow it.

The return

Curiosity returned before the plan did.

Hollow Wise did not appear during the worst part. It began later, during recovery, when curiosity started to return.

A recipe screenshot led me to ChatGPT. I wanted to know how to make what I saw, and that small experiment opened a door into AI, software, and an attempt to build a recipe-extraction database.

I knew almost nothing about building software. The project failed, changed shape, and kept pulling me back. I am autistic and have ADHD; when something is unfamiliar and full of possibilities, my curiosity can become intense. For the first time in a long time, that curiosity felt like a path forward.

The insight

I built the help I wanted to receive.

Hollow Wise began when I tried to make cleaning our kitchen easier to follow. I did not need another perfect schedule. I needed help deciding what mattered now.

I have always loved interactive menus and Choose Your Own Adventure books. The experience began to take that shape: make one bounded choice, see one useful next step, and know when you can stop. The whole house never has to become one enormous problem.

I made a way to begin with the room, the time, and the capacity I actually had. It worked for me. The product started becoming the calm, capable adult I had wanted in the room—not taking over, not judging, simply knowing how to make the problem smaller.

The point of view

The product found its point of view.

Support should not create another manager. Hollow Wise narrows home care to the next useful action for the time, energy, and capacity a person has today. You can continue, choose another direction, or stop.

AI has helped me learn, write, design, test, and build. I am not presenting myself as a traditional software engineer. I am a person with a problem, a point of view, and the determination to keep asking questions until the thing in front of me works better.

Hollow Wise is my way of sharing that support with anyone else who has looked at an ordinary task and felt every possible decision arrive at once.