slowww.garden

so i wanted to build the opposite.

i got laid off two octobers ago, and a year later i started building a tarot app for no reason. the ones i'd tried felt loud. they were built around volume: huge card libraries, spread generators, long descriptions, push notifications telling you to "discover your destiny today!" they treat tarot as content. the way i practise it, tarot is slow. you sit with a card for days and notice the patterns across months yourself.

one card a day, then it gets out of your way.

you open it, reveal today's card and write something if you want to. then you close it. you can't re-draw, so there's no gaming it until it tells you what you want to hear. i decided early on what it wouldn't have:

nobody tells you off.

if you don't open it for a month, the year view just has a gap. the reflection box has no prompt, no word count and no save button. most journaling apps feel too structured to me, and i wanted a blank field.

making it feel like it knows you.

you start by giving it your name and birthdate, plus your birth time and place if you want. it writes you a short welcome from that, based on your sun, moon and rising signs, or just your sun sign and life path number if that's all you share. i wanted that first message to be specific enough to surprise you a little. then you drag a card to begin. i made that a gesture on purpose, a small physical ritual to start the practice.

a reading that belongs to the day.

the first version had no ai readings at all. every card had one fixed meaning, so the same card read the same way for everyone, on any day. i wanted a reading to belong to the day it was drawn: the card, whether it's reversed, and where the planets sit that day relative to your own chart. there are too many combinations to write by hand, so now claude writes each reading from those inputs. the meaning still comes in layers you can take or leave:

something you could almost smell.

every card has a perfumer-style set of top, heart and base notes, so it has a smell as well as a meaning. i love scent, and words alone felt thin. you understand a meaning. a smell just happens to you, and it gets to memory before any explanation does. so each card comes with a small remembered scene that the notes never name. the top notes fade in minutes and the base is still there hours later, the way a card can stay with you all day.

my favourite screen.

every card you've drawn sits in a calendar. over time it turns into a record of where you've been. tap any day and the card opens under the sky it was drawn in, so a card pulled in the morning comes back with a morning sky, alongside what you wrote. gaps are part of the practice too.

how do you show someone their patterns without telling them what they mean?

"you've pulled swords 40% of the time this month" is something to notice. "this card might be pointing to a theme that deserves your attention" is the app noticing for you. once it starts interpreting, you've swapped fortune-telling for algorithmic self-analysis, and tarot turns into media consumption. so for a while the app didn't comment on patterns at all. what changed my mind was readers telling me certain cards kept turning up and asking what that meant. pattern cards came out of that. they name what's recurring and tie it to what's happening in the sky, and stop there. 

every technical decision was secretly a philosophical one.

you can't just say "make it feel good."

i'm not a developer. claude code wrote the code, and my job was saying exactly what i meant. i pointed at unrelated apps to explain how an empty state should feel or how the pattern view should animate, and borrowed from internal family systems, narrative therapy and rogerian approaches to explain the tone of voice. it forces you to put words to things you normally just feel.

where has solitude become hiding?

that's from the hermit, reversed. the hardest part was writing meanings that didn't recreate the thing i was escaping. every "you should" came out. each meaning describes a state and asks questions, and leans on "might" and "or". i wanted it to sound like a thoughtful friend who notices things. a coach would tell you what to do.

cards you'd want to sit with.

the direction came somewhere around my 453rd rerun of bojack horseman, where animals and humans coexist in a very matter-of-fact way. nature and animals, drawn anthropomorphic. gouache texture with visible brushstrokes, muted earthy colours, a flat layered perspective if you will. it took months of writing midjourney prompts until each card felt right, and that consistency is what makes the year view work.

a share sheet styled after an old dvd menu.

you can export a reading as a story card in a few treatments. i wanted sharing to belong to the world of the app, so it got its own menu instead of a generic share button.

a second app inside the first.

later i added a dream interpreter at slowww.garden/dreams, with its own page and a link in the footer.

come back tomorrow.

i sent it to friends first, and they liked it. and then they sent it to their friends, peaking at almost 300 visitors per day. slow garden is free, with no account and no tracking. works on phone and desktop.