Lenio
A companion for parents. Talk through tonight's hard moment once the kids are down, feel properly heard, and some nights leave with one small thing to try.
The question
Where does a hard evening go?
Bedtime blows up, there's shouting, and by 9:40pm everyone feels awful. Parenting advice is everywhere, books, podcasts, endless threads. Somewhere to be honest about how last night actually went is much rarer. Friends get the edited version. So the question became, what would it take for a parent to say the unedited one out loud?
The itch
Listening had to come first
Most parenting tools arrive with a plan for you. I kept thinking the missing thing was smaller than that, somewhere to put the moment down first and feel heard before anything else happens. So Lenio listens properly, stays gentle, and only sometimes offers one small thing to try. No judgement, no homework, and it deliberately doesn't pile on advice.
What happened
Live, and very deliberate about its voice
Lenio is live at lenio.fyi, in the browser on any phone, built for the 9:40pm moment when the kids are finally down. The interesting work turned out to be the voice. I built a little prompt lab and measured variants against each other, and honestly some of my favourite ideas lost. I tried making it funnier, and I tried making it more challenging. Both lost to plain, careful listening. There's also a separate safety layer that watches every conversation alongside the guide, because a companion for people at a low ebb has to take that seriously.
9:40pm, kids finally down. You talk, Lenio listens properly.
For the evenings that go sideways.
Lenio is live at lenio.fyi with seven free days. If your evenings sometimes go sideways, or you know a parent whose evenings do, have a look.
Visit lenio.fyi →› A note on how it's built
A TypeScript web app with its own Node server, Postgres behind it and a background worker for the slow jobs. The guide runs on Claude with a separate safety classifier watching alongside it, and prompt changes go through a lab where variants are measured against each other rather than eyeballed. The design language is deliberately quiet, one spot of orange per screen for the primary action, and parent-authored words are never truncated where they can be acted on.
- Talk through the moment, be heard first, advice only in small doses
- A safety layer reviews every conversation alongside the guide
- Voice variants are tested in a prompt lab, and listening keeps winning
- Works in the browser on any phone, nothing to install