TouchGrass
A friendly group challenge to spend less time on social media, with AI screen-time checks, offline activity ideas and a personal diary.
Project Details
About the Project
I've caught myself doomscrolling more times than I'd like to admit. I wanted to spend less time on my phone, but knowing I should stop wasn't always enough: I needed an incentive to actually put it down. When the AI Lodge Hackathon came along, I thought, why not build something for a problem I experience myself?
What It Does
The idea is simple: create a group, invite your friends and hold each other accountable. The group creator sets a forfeit, so there's a little more at stake than another screen-time reminder you can easily dismiss. Lower weekly social media use wins, and the highest total owes the forfeit.
TouchGrass brings together:
- a weekly leaderboard — the public demo shows a fictional group's week, ranked with the app's real ranking rules;
- a screenshot check — upload a daily screen-time screenshot and AI reads the date and your social media minutes, without saving anything;
- activity ideas — choose your interests, time, company and setting to get three things to do instead of scrolling; and
- a personal diary — log your phone use and reflect on what encouraged scrolling or helped you disconnect, saved in your browser.
How I Built It
I built TouchGrass with Vue 3 and Vite for the frontend and Node.js with Express for the backend. I used AI coding tools throughout to turn ideas into working features, troubleshoot errors and refine the interface.
As a beginner developer, connecting the frontend, backend and database came with plenty of unfamiliar problems, and deployment meant figuring out build settings and environment variables. Breaking problems into smaller steps, reading errors and asking for help kept me moving forward.
Project Satisfaction
My proudest moments were seeing my ideas come to life with each change: a button working, a page updating, different parts of the app connecting. Turning my own struggle with doomscrolling into an app people can try was especially meaningful.
Key Takeaway
Although I vibe coded TouchGrass, I learnt a lot about how parts of a web app communicate, how data is stored and how to deploy beyond localhost. Learning to ask questions without feeling embarrassed helped me most, and I learnt that we can start building while we're still learning.
Areas for Improvement
I'd make screen-time tracking more seamless, explore more ways to keep friends motivated, and learn from user feedback which incentives actually help people spend less time scrolling.