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Show HN: Dlog – Journaling and AI coach that learns what drives wellbeing (Mac)

(dlog.pro)
46 points dr-j | 2 comments | 27 Oct 25 17:14 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

Hi HN! I’m Johan. I built Dlog, a journaling app with an AI coach that tracks how your personality, daily experiences, and well-being connect over time. It’s based on my PhD research in entrepreneurial well-being.

Edit: here's a video demo so you can see it before downloading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74C4P8I164M - it's unvarnished but I'm told that's how people like it here :)

How Dlog works

- Journal and set goals/projects; Dlog scores entries on-device (sentiment + narrative signals) and updates your personal model.

- A built-in structural equation model (SEM) estimates which factors actually move your well-being week to week.

- The Coach turns those findings into specific guidance (e.g., “protect 90 minutes after client calls; that’s when energy dips for you”).

- No account; your journals live locally (in your calendar). You decide what, if anything, leaves the device.

The problem

- Generic AI coaches give advice without understanding your personality or context.

- Traditional journaling is reflective but doesn’t surface causal patterns.

- Well-being apps rarely account for individual differences or test what works for you over time.

What my research found (plain English)

In my PhD I modeled how Personality, Character, Resources, and Well-Being interact over time. The key is latent relationships: for example, Autonomy can buffer the impact of low Extraversion on social drain, while time/energy constraints mediate whether “good advice” is actionable. These effects are person-specific and evolve—so you need a model that learns you, not averages.

The solution

Dlog pairs on-device journaling analytics with an SEM that updates weekly. You get a running estimate of “what moves the needle for me,” and the Coach translates that into concrete suggestions aligned with your goals and constraints.

Early stories (anonymized from pilot users)

- A founder saw energy dips clustered after external calls; moving deep work to mornings reduced “bad days” and improved weekly mood stability.

- A solo designer’s autonomy scores predicted well-being more than raw hours worked; small boundary changes (client comms windows) helped more than time-tracking tweaks.

Tech & security

- Platform: macOS (Swift/SwiftUI). Data: local storage + EventKit calendar for entries/timestamps.

- Analytics: on-device sentiment + narrative features; SEM computed locally; weekly updates compare to your baseline.

- AI Coach: uses an enterprise LLM API for reasoning on derived features/summaries. By default, raw journal text does not leave the device; you can opt-in per prompt if you want the Coach to read a specific passage.

- Why 61 baseline variables? The SEM needs multiple indicators per construct (Personality, Character, Resources, Well-Being) to estimate stable latent factors without overfitting; weekly check-ins refresh those signals.

What I’ve learned building this

- Users value clarity with depth: concise recommendations paired with focused dashboards, often 5–10 charts, to explain the “why” and trade-offs.

- Cold start matters: a solid baseline makes the first week of insights credibly useful.

- Privacy UX needs to be explicit: users want granular control over what the Coach can read, per request.

I’m looking for feedback on:

- Onboarding (baseline survey and first-week experience)

- Coach guidance clarity and usefulness

- Analytics accuracy vs. your lived experience

- Edge cases, bugs, and performance

Download: https://dlog.pro

If you hit token limits while testing, email me at johan@dlog.pro

Background

PhD (Hunter Center for Entrepreneurship, Strathclyde), MBA (Babson), BComm (UCD). I study solo self-employment and well-being, and built Dlog to bring that research into a tool practitioners can use.

Note: The Coach activates after your first scored entry. If you haven’t written one yet, you’ll see a hold state—add a quick journal entry and it unlocks.

Appearance: On a few Macs the initial theme can render darker than intended. If you see this, switch to Light Mode as a temporary workaround; a fix is incoming.

Edit: For general users it's free for 14 days with 10K free tokens; then its 1.99 per month at the moment. However, for HN readers that DM me or email me with the email they register with, I'll give a free perpetual license so there's no monthly fee; and add 1 million tokens.

1. fernly ◴[28 Oct 25 02:39 UTC] No.45728724[source]▶
Questions while watching the video.

Calendar is central, but I use a Google calendar which is important to me. Connect it?

Seems like a "dlog" is a calendar entry. So is my "journal" broken up into separate pages, not a sequential document or blog?

2:30 ff, strongly suggest that for your next video you pre-script it to avoid fumbling and mumbling.

5:10 side note, interesting that your personality(?) model was from 2018, well before LLMs.

7:50 for an app to produce such output (impact of a friend on mood) you surely must do a copious amount of extremely frank journaling. When, and in what format? As scattered calendar entries? I'm confused how I fuel the app.

10:40 relating diary entries (reported activities and attitudes) to one's stated goals -- this is what I would expect an AI to do, and tell me about them rather than the reverse.

I'm sorry, I just don't see how I could use or adapt to something like this when I have a well-established diary/blog and calendar, it would mean changing many daily habits and adding what looks like a lot of detail work.

replies(1): >>45731516 #
2. dr-j ◴[28 Oct 25 11:36 UTC] No.45731516[source]▶
Thanks so much for your detailed feedback and for watching my rather unvarnished intro video with too many ums and ahs!

- Calendar is central, but I use a Google calendar which is important to me. Connect it? Dlog will use the default apple calendar which, if is your Google calendar, will display automatically. - Seems like a "dlog" is a calendar entry. So is my "journal" broken up into separate pages, not a sequential document or blog?

Not quite, a calendar event has a title and notes. The title of the dlog will be whatever you call it, the default is (if your name is anon) Anon’s Dlog. The notes of the event are where the journal entry is stored; along with Dlog tags such as goals, journal type, and sentiment scoring. - 2:30 ff, strongly suggest that for your next video you pre-script it to avoid fumbling and mumbling.

Yes, agreed, I made that very quickly yesterday. I’ll re-record it today. I still want to keep it quite unvarnished though as the HN mods told me that this is what Show HN community prefers

- 5:10 side note, interesting that your personality(?) model was from 2018, well before LLMs.

Yes, I never dreamed this would be possible until the introduction of ChatGPT. - 7:50 for an app to produce such output (impact of a friend on mood) you surely must do a copious amount of extremely frank journaling. When, and in what format? As scattered calendar entries? I'm confused how I fuel the app.

Yes, you’d just journal normally, as you have various important experiences you can journal about this in free form, stream of consciousness etc.; or use the guided four rings prompts in the Journal Coach at the top left of the Dlog entry area. It doesn’t have to be copious, or systematic, because the model is time series, it doesn’t require fixed repeated entries. If you use Dlog for a few days or weeks I’d be very interested to see if you found the responses useful. And again, if you send me a DM I’ll provide a free perpetual license so Dlog is always free for you to use.

- 10:40 relating diary entries (reported activities and attitudes) to one's stated goals -- this is what I would expect an AI to do, and tell me about them rather than the reverse.

The feature at 10:40 relates to just summarizing the entries that have been added to that goal; it is not related to the AI coach (which does what you’ve stated that you expect i.e. relates diary entries to activities and attitudes to ones goals) - I'm sorry, I just don't see how I could use or adapt to something like this when I have a well-established diary/blog and calendar, it would mean changing many daily habits and adding what looks like a lot of detail work.

Apologies, I do think the technical intro video is giving a lot of behind the scenes background information which may be overwhelming if you’re simply looking to journal and improve well-being.

I would gently recommend that you try it out for a few days and see that it’s fairly intuitive to use and well worth the process once you start seeing the insights from the coach (which get better over time).

Warm regards, Dr J.