Generating a Workout Is Easy, Doing It Is Not
WAGMI writes your training plan and tracks the habits around it. Only one of those is a hard problem, and it is not the one I built first.
WAGMI is a fitness and longevity app. It generates workouts, tracks the habits around them, and has an AI coach that talks like an overexcited friend.
I built the generator first, because the generator is the fun part. Describe your equipment, your time, and your goal, and a model writes you a sensible session in about four seconds. It is a good feature. It is also almost entirely beside the point.
Plan quality was never the bottleneck
Nobody is unfit because their programme was suboptimal. The internet has been giving away excellent free training plans for twenty years. People have the plan. They do not do the plan.
Which means an AI that produces an even better plan is optimising a variable that was not binding. It feels like progress because the output is visibly impressive, and generated plans are the thing that demos well, so it is very easy to keep polishing them and call it product work.
The real number is how many sessions happened this week. Everything that does not move that number is decoration.
So the habit tracking is the product
Once that landed, the shape changed. The generator stopped being the centre and became a supporting feature, and the app organised itself around showing up: streaks, the small daily longevity habits, and a record that makes consistency visible when a single session feels like nothing.
Consistency is invisible from inside it. Any given Tuesday is unremarkable. Eleven Tuesdays in a row is the entire thing, and you only feel that if something is holding the count for you.
A coach that is only ever hype stops working
The AI coach was the other lesson. The first version was relentlessly positive, which is on brand and got boring fast. Unconditional praise carries no information. If it celebrates equally whether you trained four times or zero, you learn to ignore it, and you learn that quickly.
It got more useful when it was allowed to notice things. That you always skip Thursdays. That you have not gone near a leg session in three weeks. Still warm, still on your side, but responding to what actually happened rather than performing encouragement into the void.
Praise means something only when it was possible to not receive it.
What I took from it
Find the binding constraint before you build. I spent my first effort on plan quality, which was already solved and free.
The impressive feature and the valuable feature are frequently different features. Generation demos beautifully and changes nothing on its own.
Feedback needs the capacity to be negative. An assistant that approves of everything is decoration with a personality.