The Problem
Note apps are dumb containers. You write something, it sits there. If you want an AI to help you make sense of your health, you copy-paste your notes into ChatGPT and re-explain your entire history every time. The AI has amnesia. Your notes have no intelligence. You're the glue holding it together — and if you're neurodivergent, being the glue is exactly the thing you can't do.
I know this because I've lived it for a decade.
My Situation
I have ASD, ADHD, and recurrent depression. I've been in psychiatric treatment since 2015 — over 20 medication changes, years of psychotherapy, multiple medication combinations. I also manage a complex eye condition — blind in my left eye since childhood, 11 surgeries. Each condition interacts with the others. Medications for ADHD cause side effects that affect my eye. Supplements for cognitive function cause acid reflux. The depression fluctuates with every environmental change.
No app existed that could hold all of this in one place and actually help me make sense of it. Health trackers want me to tap buttons and rate my mood 1-5. Journaling apps store text and do nothing with it. AI chatbots forget everything between sessions.
So I built the tool I needed.
What Cortex Does
You write or speak freely — no forms, no ratings, no structured input. Just say what happened, how you feel, what you noticed.
Cortex does the rest:
- Classifies your entry — observation, strategy, venting, reflection, medication note, or event
- Extracts factual entities — symptoms, medications, activities, emotions — without interpreting causality
- Remembers everything through semantic search and keyword indexing
- Retrieves relevant past entries when you talk to the AI assistant
- Interprets fresh every time from your actual words — no pre-baked conclusions, no feedback loops
The AI assistant, Mimo, feels like talking to someone who has read every journal entry you've ever written. Because it has.
Why It Matters for Neurodivergent People
Most health tools are built with a neurotypical assumption: that users have the executive function to log consistently, the working memory to remember their own patterns, and the emotional bandwidth to review clinical data about themselves.
Neurodivergent people — especially those managing ADHD, autism, and depression simultaneously — often don't. The tracking tool itself becomes another demand on a system that's already overloaded.
Cortex is designed around this reality. Minimal friction. Voice input when typing is too much. No judgment about what you write. An AI that does the organizing so you don't have to. Write freely. The app handles the rest.
How I Built It
I built Cortex alone. No team, no funding, no startup. Over 700 commits across a full architectural evolution — including a 126-commit learning experience where I built a knowledge graph, discovered it was the wrong approach (it created feedback loops that manufactured false certainty), and replaced it with the right architecture: retrieval over raw text.
The tech stack: SwiftUI, CoreData with 50+ entities, AWS Bedrock (Claude AI), on-device semantic embeddings, sqlite-vec for vector storage, Whisper for voice transcription, hybrid retrieval with reciprocal rank fusion.
I'm not listing these details to impress anyone. I'm listing them because they represent what one person can build when the problem is personal enough.
What's Next
Cortex is in active development, approaching release. You can learn more at ms-dev.app or reach me at m_sakkal@outlook.com.
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