The person who started this project was going through a rough time in a relationship. Not the kind where you need a lawyer, just the kind where you can’t see straight anymore. He’d been on the phone with friends and family for weeks. Everyone was supportive. No one was getting through. One night he wrote out everything he was feeling in his notes app, not to send, just to get it out. Then he copy-pasted it into ChatGPT and typed “am I overthinking this?” The response was blunt and probably pretty generic. But it said something none of his friends had managed to make him see. He got out. And he couldn’t stop thinking about why a piece of generated text had done what the people who loved him couldn’t. That stuck with all of us. I came on board early, third person on the project. I do the business and growth side rather than the engineering. I joined because I thought what we were trying to do was actually worth doing. The idea is pretty simple. You talk through what’s going on in your relationship, an argument, a pattern you keep noticing, something you can’t quite put into words, and Distant listens and offers some perspective. You can take it or leave it entirely. It’s not trying to solve anything. It just shows you angles you might not have thought about. The difference from just opening ChatGPT is that it remembers. Not just your last message but everything you’ve shared over time, so what it says to you is actually informed by your situation, not just whatever you typed today. It took way longer to build than any of us expected. Getting the memory to work in a way that actually felt useful rather than just technically functional, making sure the responses reflected what someone had actually told it rather than defaulting to generic advice, that was harder than it sounds. At one point we nearly just shipped something really rough and figured we’d work it out from there. We kind of did that anyway if I’m honest. It’s early. The responses aren’t always what we want them to be. We’re still working out what good looks like. One thing we didn’t see coming: someone used an early version to work through some stuff with his dad. Not a partner, just a difficult relationship he was trying to navigate. Apparently it really helped. We’re still thinking about what that means for where this goes. It’s probably most useful if you’re the kind of person who wants to understand what’s going on before you do something about it. Not necessarily in crisis, just tired of going round in circles in your own head. It’s live now on iOS: Distant on the App Store Or if you want to look around first: getdistant.com Happy to answer anything.   submitted by   /u/SepticDNB [link]   [comments]