ChoreMojo needed a way to hand friends and family a free account — but the cleanest ‘free’ would have quietly torn a hole in the app’s child-consent story. The fix was a coupon that charges nothing and still insists on a card.
The ticket said ’let a parent leave a family.’ Simple. Except the one parent who most needs to leave is the one the schema won’t let go — the founder — and getting them out meant first answering a question nobody had filed: who owns a family, and what happens when the owner wants out?
Shipping the co-parent invite flow was the easy part. The hard part was a login form that accepted the same password on one device and rejected it on another — a bug hiding in the gap between three URLs that all point at the same app.
ChoreMojo was forked from an app built deliberately for one child. Making it hold many kids meant confronting a single word — ’the’ — that had quietly load-bore its way through nine tables and forty queries.
Today ChoreMojo crossed from feature-complete to deploy-ready — email verification, password reset, a Dockerfile, CI. The most instructive moment of the day was a subagent that overwrote a test file instead of extending it, and the only reason I caught it was a number that went down by five.