It’s 4 a.m. and Whitney Stefko Dover’s family’s “chief of staff” is already sending her daily reports.
It’s called “Daily Dover.”
Early morning operational briefings help Stefko Dover and her husband Chris reconcile their complicated lives with their two young sons. The AI assistant scans your email and calendar apps to plan your day. This includes school schedules, au pair and babysitter interviews, camping pick-ups and pick-ups, travel plans, family birthdays, trash can reminders, and anything else that might keep spinning around in Stefko Dover’s brain until it’s dealt with or forgotten.
At the bottom of the email, the AI creates two short pieces of text with reminders. One for her husband and one for Sarah, a family pair. The sentences also contain affirmative sentences.
“It sounds really stupid, but it really improved my marriage,” Stefko Dover told Business Insider. “I don’t resent having to take on all this extra mental work now.”
Stefko Dover, director and senior policy and legal advisor at Ford Motor Company, built an assistant named Claudette using Anthropic’s tools, including Claude Code and Claude Cowork.
Her husband, who is developing an app that uses AI to track supplements and household finances, also told Business Insider it’s been a lifesaver.
Stefko Dover is one of a growing number of people with no coding experience building AI assistants to manage the repetitive, boring, and emotionally taxing parts of everyday life. They have developed products to help you grocery shop and find the perfect food for your family.
Instead of writing line-by-line code, describe in plain English the tasks you want the agent to perform. This is a technique called “vibe coding.”
“Let me think of a way to automate that.”
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whitney stefko
Stefko Dover first turned to AI to help organize her family’s daily activities during a trip in March. While she was away from her parents’ home in Scottsdale, Arizona, her husband asked her to make a to-do list. I had to coordinate babysitters, keep track of soccer schedules, and account for day-to-day arrangements.
“I thought to myself, ‘Yeah, let’s figure out a way to automate that,'” Stefko Dover said.
That week, she used her $17/month Claude Pro subscription to learn which apps the tool should monitor and what to include in daily emails.
She quickly shipped the first version of Claudette, but it needed editing.
Early iterations sent text messages that were too detailed. For example, the texts suggested to my husband included hourly reminders. One prompt reminded my husband when the kids should brush their teeth.
She continually adjusted the system via voice reminders on her phone’s Claude app to let families know what they actually needed to know: when Dover was at work, when the au pair was taking over, which appointments and school events were important, and what was coming next.
She said she uses Claude enough that she frequently runs into token limits on AI plans.
She still occasionally serves as Claudette’s editor, primarily responsible for fine-tuning the affirmations to her voice. She called her system “human relations.”
But it’s getting much better, she said, and may not need as many edits anytime soon.
Claudette’s message to Chris, drafted on May 21st, began: “Good morning. It’s the second day of summer and it’s shaping up to be a beautiful day. It’s getting really hot.”
Then it moved on to business. Since it was her mother’s birthday today, Claudette advised that she should send her a quick text or flowers. The next morning, the recycling took place, and by accessing Stefko Dover’s Gmail, Claudette learned that she had recently purchased new furniture. It arrived in a large cardboard box, so I had to disassemble it and dispose of it. And there were a lot of them.
“Your wife has a real problem with shopping,” Claudette wrote, according to Stefko Dover. She kept in touch.
personal life organizer
Poynton has several friends and family members online who use his app to sort through their shopping lists.
Jessica Pettway of BI
Stefko Dover said Claudette helped her organize two major family boundaries: birthday parties and school mail.
“Only 9 million people have birthday parties every weekend, and managing them manually can be a pain,” she says. Just remembering my birthday “probably saved our marriage.”
Still, Stefko Dover said she has no concrete plans to share Claudette with the world. If she were to make it available, she told Business Insider she would open source the prompts so other families could build their own scheduling tools.
“This is one of the biggest hacks for me,” she said. “It made things a lot better and the mental strain at home was a lot easier.”
Stefko Dover still has to make the final decision about what’s appropriate for texting the people in her life. But she knows that by 4 a.m., her chief of staff is already sorting out the family’s daily priorities.
All you have to do is check your slate and press send.