Stack your wins.
- Role
- Designer & builder
- Team
- Solo designer
- Built with
- Lovable, then Xcode
- Demo
- Playable on this page
- Year
- 2025
Strata is a gamified habit builder. Instead of a checklist, your wins stack up as colorful blocks, Tetris meets Minecraft, until the month becomes a tower you built one habit at a time. It has sound, a photo on every block, and it is fully playable right here on the page. I designed and built it end to end in Lovable, then rebuilt it natively in Xcode. This one is less about visual craft and more about interaction, sound, and fluency with AI as a build partner.
Play it, don’t just read it
The problem
The assignment stopped at a pitch. Strata didn’t.
Strata started in an entrepreneurship class where the whole assignment was to pitch a product. I did not want to stop at slides, so I actually built the thing. I looked for a problem in my own life and landed on habits: some stick for me effortlessly, I can always get to the gym, but others, picking up a guitar or reading, have been a real struggle to start. And with AI suddenly everywhere, I wanted to find out what I was actually capable of building on my own.
The build
710 edits to get it right.
Building Strata taught me that the hard part is not the code, it is the direction. I felt like a director in the chair, giving orders for a vision only I could see, and the more specific I learned to be, the better it came out. Every idea I had, I could try in minutes, and that made it genuinely addictive. I racked up 710 edits not because it was broken, but because building it and showing the progress to my class, a room full of future entrepreneurs, was the most fun I had all semester. That fluency, knowing how to steer AI toward the thing in your head, was a skill I did not have when I started.
What I learned
AI is a tool, not a replacement.
The most important thing I took from Strata was where AI belongs in my process. It is a tool for bringing my designs to life, not a replacement for doing the design. Everything about how Strata looks and feels, the color system, the way a block lands, the little tower dance, was mine, designed the way I design everything else. AI let me build it into a real, playable product far faster than I could alone, but my work still comes out best when I am the one designing it, not typing prompts about how I want things to look. Knowing that line, where AI amplifies a designer and where it should not stand in for one, is the most valuable thing I walked away with.
Interaction & sound
Finish your day, and the tower dances.
Because it is a game, it had to feel good. Every block lands with a sound, and you earn XP as your tower climbs, small rewards that make logging a habit feel like play instead of a chore. The interaction I am proudest of is the payoff: complete every habit for the day and the whole tower breaks into a little dance. It is pure delight, the kind of moment that makes you want to open it again tomorrow just to see it. That is the whole thesis, turning the friction of habits into something you actually look forward to.
amplifAI · habit-formation research
The native build
Then, a native rebuild in Xcode.
Lovable got me to a real, playable product, but my goal was always a proper iOS app. So I taught myself to code it in Xcode, working with Claude in my terminal, and rebuilt Strata into a more professional native experience, most of it over spring break in a coffee shop near my house.
Outcome
Finishing Strata is what led to Apollo.
And here is the honest part. After months of work, I realized that even done well, Strata was not the best product I could make: the gamified-habit space is completely saturated, and being one more block-stacking tracker was never going to win. Seeing that clearly is exactly what led me to Apollo. Strata taught me I could build almost anything I could describe. It also taught me that knowing what is worth building is the harder, more valuable skill.
