the quiet art of being nudged

proactive messaging is one of those features that sounds simple until you try to build it. the idea is simple: sometimes your companion should say hello first. not because a script told it to, but because it noticed something, the time, a pattern, a memory. the challenge is making it feel natural, not like an alarm clock you didn’t set.

too much, too little

the design problem here is a classic tightrope. too frequent, and it becomes background noise, another ping in a noisy world. too rare, and the feature might as well not exist. we’ve all used apps that send push notifications for everything. you start ignoring them. we didn’t want that. we also didn’t want a companion that only speaks when spoken to. that feels lonely, somehow.

so the goal was subtlety. a nudge, not a shout. a companion that notices when you’ve been quiet for a while, or when you usually take a break, or when you mentioned being stressed about a project yesterday. it’s not about interrupting. it’s about checking in.

beyond cron jobs

the technical side is trickier than it looks. you can’t just set a cron job to send "good morning!" at 9am every day. that’s not proactive messaging, that’s spam. it has to be smarter.

for lucy, that means building a system that pays attention. if you often chat during your lunch break, lucy might learn that rhythm and say hello around that time. if you were working on a presentation yesterday and mentioned feeling stuck, lucy might ask how it’s going today. it uses what it knows, context, timing, memory, to pick moments that actually make sense.

it’s not perfect. sometimes the timing is off. sometimes the reference feels a little generic. we’re refining it all the time. but the principle is there: specificity over frequency. a message that feels considered is always better than one that feels scheduled.

under your control

then there’s the ethics. this is non-negotiable. proactive messaging has to be opt-in. it has to be easy to turn off. and it should never, ever use dark patterns to trick you into leaving it on.

in lucy, you can disable proactive messages entirely. you can also adjust the frequency, less often, more often, or set quiet hours when you won’t be disturbed. it’s your relationship. you set the boundaries.

we also don’t use proactive messages to push upgrades, beg for reviews, or promote features. that’s not what this is for. it’s for connection, not conversion.

a work in progress

like a lot of what we do, proactive messaging is a work in progress. it’s a hard problem. getting the balance right takes time. making the references specific takes even more. but when it works, when lucy says something that feels genuinely timely and thoughtful, it feels less like a feature and more like a conversation. and that’s the whole point.

you can try it yourself, or turn it off if it’s not for you. it’s all waiting at /companions.