At New Leaf
Last Sunday I was standing at the dock at New Leaf — our lake house on Lake Sacandaga — with my brother and brother-in-law. We were troubleshooting the sump pump on the group pontoon. Classic end-of-weekend problem. It wasn't working, and since it was our last day, the conversation quickly turned to logistics: who's going to order the new pump? Who's going to install it? Two more tasks surfaced before we even finished the first sentence.
That moment stuck with me.
The beauty of a lake house — or a shared boat — is everything it represents: time with the people you love, in one of the most beautiful settings imaginable. But the challenge is that the responsibility of keeping it all running tends to fall on whoever owns it, even when everyone around you is genuinely willing to pitch in. The owner becomes the default manager. And when you're the manager, it's nearly impossible to actually relax and enjoy the place you worked so hard to create.
"The goal was never to own a lake house. The goal was to enjoy one."
The Idea
What if a shared space came with a shared list? Not assigned tasks — no one wants to feel managed on a weekend away. But a visible, open list that anyone in the group could see, claim, and cross off. A dock notice board for the digital age.
Two kinds of tasks naturally emerged in my mind. The recurring ones — the arrival checklist, the departure checklist, the things that happen every single time someone shows up or heads home. And the ongoing ones — the loose hinge on the screen door, the life jackets that need replacing, the dock light that's been flickering for two weeks. Tasks that just need someone to notice them and say: I've got it.
I brought the idea to Claude later that week. We talked through the concept, connected it to the Velayo mission, and started sketching. Within a session, OurKeep had a name, a structure, and a first design. That's what building with AI looks like in practice — the idea is yours, the speed is extraordinary.
Why It Fits
Every Velayo app has to earn its place by moving the needle on at least one of our three pillars. OurKeep moves all three — and that's rare enough to be worth noting.
A First Look
Here is the first design pass — built in a single session. Arrival and departure modes. Open task claiming. Recurring checklists and ongoing to-dos living side by side. The crew visible at a glance at the top of the screen.
No one is assigned anything. Everyone can see what needs doing. Anyone can claim it. That's the entire design philosophy in three sentences.
How Fast This Moves
I want to be transparent about what building at Velayo actually looks like. The idea happened at the dock on Sunday. The name, the concept, and the first design were done by Wednesday — in a single session with Claude. I start building the React prototype this weekend. An alpha should follow quickly, because a significant amount of the architecture from OurProvisions carries directly over.
This is the compounding advantage of building a portfolio of related apps. Every app we ship makes the next one faster. The shared list infrastructure, the household membership model, the UI patterns — they were all built once and now serve the whole fleet.
The boat is still our office. The harbour is growing.
"If you've ever owned a shared space and felt the weight of being the only one who knows what needs doing — this one is for you."