GUIDES
Build The Viral Family Assistant In Claude 📚
There's a viral app called Ollie that runs your whole family, dinners, bills, calendars. The idea is great. But you can build the same thing yourself inside.
Source
Ollie — the viral family AI assistant (ollie.ai)There's an app called Ollie blowing up right now, and honestly the idea is really cool. It's an AI assistant for your whole family that creates your grocery list, plans your dinners, tracks all your bills, and manages everyone's calendar.
As amazing as it is, you can build this yourself inside Claude for free. The app has 70 different features, and I checked, Claude can do about 65 of them. So before you pay for anything, build it first. Here are the four steps.
Make A "Family HQ" Project
Open Claude and make a new Project called "Family HQ." Then paste the prompt below into the chat. It will interview you, one question at a time, on your kids' names and allergies, your weekly routines, your recurring bills, and everything else it needs to run your house.
When it's done, it hands you a clean summary. Copy that into the Project's custom instructions so Claude remembers it in every future chat.
Paste this into your Family HQ project to start the interview
What's a Claude Project?
A Project is a workspace in Claude that keeps its instructions across every chat inside it. Set up Family HQ once, paste your family profile into the instructions, and every conversation already knows your kids, your routines, and your bills, no re-explaining.
Connect Calendar + Email
In any Claude chat, click the + (plus) in the message box, open Connectors, and turn on Google Calendar and Gmail. You'll sign in with Google once. Now Claude can see your schedule, find conflicts, plan your week, watch your inbox for bills, and tell you exactly when something's due.
Once they're connected, you can ask things like the prompt below and Claude pulls straight from your real calendar and inbox.
Good to know
Claude drafts emails but won't send them on its own, you stay in control. A few honest limits: it reads one Google account at a time, it can't open the contents of email attachments (so a PDF bill won't be read), and it only checks when you ask. The "always watching" part comes from Step 4.
Photo Your Fridge, Get Dinner
Snap a photo of what's in your fridge and pantry and drop it in the chat. Claude plans your meals and grocery list around what you already have, so you waste less and buy less.
Then connect Instacart, and it takes that grocery list and builds your actual cart for you.
Try it
Fridge Photo To Full Cart
Send a fridge/pantry photo with this
A Rundown Every Morning
Last step: set up a scheduled task so Claude runs on its own. Every morning there's a rundown waiting for you, today's schedule, what's for dinner, what's due, and what needs a reply. And any time you need something, you just message Claude.
Two ways to do this today: in the Claude desktop app, type /schedule to set a recurring task (note: it runs while your computer is awake and Claude is open). Or use Routines in Claude Code, which run in the cloud even when your computer is off. Both need a paid plan (Claude Pro and up), so this is the one piece of your Family HQ that isn't free.
Set it once
Your Daily Family Brief
Schedule this to run every morning
The Real Win
One tip to make this great: Claude starts each chat fresh, so keep your family profile, favorite meals, and bill dates saved in the project instructions. That's the memory the paid apps charge for, and you just built it for free. Before you buy any viral app, try building it yourself first, you can do about 90% of what's out there.
The real unlock of AI agents is not full autonomy, but human-in-the-loop systems design. Structure your agent inputs with explicit constraints, negative prompts, and automated test checkpoints. When building tools, keep token consumption lean by caching system prompts and isolating tasks into specialized sub-agents.