History

Mental Hygienist started as a name for a private practice, the one I'd open if I ever went back out on my own. It's a play on "dental hygienist," of course. I played with it for years and registered it as an LLC in Utah in 2022 when I was doing contract Clinical Supervision. For a long time, that's all it was: a name for a simple practice.

For many years, pretty much since iPhone apps became a thing, I had conceived ideas for many apps I would write if I had ever kept up my original collegiate degree of choice and my coding endeavors, but alas...my other commitments really kept me otherwise busy and I didn't want to learn to code.

Then I realized I didn't need to learn to code to build the tools I kept wishing I had. In February 2026, Mental Hygienist got its first app.

2026

  1. February

    SplitBook, for splitting household expenses. Built with Claude Code back in its early days: a dozen commits in the first four days, several of them titled simply "Change."

  2. Spring

    DriveDeck (IRS mileage logging that I originally built for my wife and her business, Aqua Native) goes live in May, then FuelDeck (gas and EV fuel tracking), then a simple time interval tracking app SinceBook (how long since you last…).

  3. June

    GearCheck becomes GearDeck, and the site moves to mentalhygienist.app.

  4. July

    Three new apps in eight days: ValuesBook, a values card sort; TextDex, a Markdown editor for Mac and iPhone I created so I didn't have to pay for one; and Bad Aura, a headache tracker I wrote for someone in my family.

  5. September

    GearDeck finally clears Strava's API limits after months of being approved and waiting. It's the one closest to my heart: bike maintenance built for the riders I coach and the sport I love. ValuesBook 1.0 goes live and deserves more attention than it's getting from me.

  6. October

    DriveDeck gets CarPlay. TextDex gets parked: I bought Nova, and it does the job extremely well. Bad Aura heads to the App Store, free, mostly because I'd rather my family member download it than keep building it to their phone, but also, because I keep talking to more people would benefit from it.

How they're made

Every app here says the same thing on its About screen:

This app was vibe-coded using Claude AI with the SwiftUI framework.

That's the truth. None of this happened because I learned to code. It happened because I realized I didn't have to. I bring the problems, the taste, and the testing on a real phone. Claude writes most of the code and keeps notes, so each session knows what the last one learned.

What's next

More of the same: thinking up custom apps that keep more in the apps and less on the mind. That's the hygiene part.

— Jared