The problem Serene.club solves

All of us at some point in our lives come across hardships and things we can't figure out. And that's where the need for mental health companion comes in. Being somewhat of an introvert ourselves (some of us) we know how hard it can be to share your feelings and vent out your thoughts. And along with that, there's also a need to have healthy habits and regularly reflect on your life decisions. And to achieve this, most people use many different apps like journal apps and habit trackers and even get counseling for venting out.
This is where Serene comes in. It has all the three features that you need to have a healthy mental life. It provides you with a habit tracking tool, a personal journal and a way to vent out your thoughts and even get counselled by AI which won't judge you. So, people don't have to worry about embarrassing yourself or bottle up your thoughts, they can open up completely and vent out whatever's on their mind. The habit tracking tool lets you create habits and track them as well, and the personal journal allows you to create journal entries and reflect on your day-to-day life easily. It also lets you edit and delete existing journal entries.

Challenges we ran into

1. Giving the correct prompt to OpenAI

Training OpenAI to act like a therapist was somewhat of a hard thing to figure out. We had to test a lot of different prompts and check if the answer the AI was giving was good enough to be called an emotional support.

2. Updating the UI in real time when user adds new habits or journal entries

We have built the backend using tRPC, and it took us around 2 hours to figure out how to update the UI in real time when user creates a new journal entry or habit. The trick to it was invalidating the react-query cache and refetching it right before the data was mutated.

3. Frontend creation

While building the frontend, we came across a lot of tough issues to solve like irregular gaps, or relative positioning, CSS animations and making the web app responsive so that users can use it on their phone as well.