Local caregivers build their own scheduling app with AI help

Seven people sat around a conference table at Biscochito three years ago, watching a software demo. The California company presenting the platform claimed it could give workers more decision-making power. When the group asked if caregivers could adjust their own schedules, the salesperson laughed and asked why they would give them that power. She flatly told them they would fail.

The group believed the people doing the work were best suited to make important decisions. However, every practice management system they reviewed was strictly top down. These systems were built to keep decisions out of the hands of the workers. Anyone who was not a manager had to go through one to make changes. They eventually chose a system made by a Canadian company that was polite about its limitations.

Last week, the group discovered they did not need to hire experts to make the platforms work the way they wanted. In September, the team wrote about Super Subs, a plan to grow without adding layers of management. This model relies on peers supporting peers. Nina Martinez and Roberta Payne, who have done this work for years, helped catalog the most important tasks.

The team spent a couple of hours in a room starting with the story rather than the software. One person stood at a whiteboard and talked through the whole scenario, including every wrinkle, while voice-to-text caught every word. The team watched to see if the AI could make sense of the rambling. It turned the conversation into a mockup of the app, which the group refined together.

Maxine Swisa then built the layers underneath the app, asking the AI how to proceed when she was stuck. She has spent about six hours on the project so far. The app uses Claude, an AI assistant, for the mockup and build. It is hosted on Netlify, an inexpensive platform, and uses a small Google Apps Script to save data.

Here is how the system works when a caregiver calls in sick. A Super Sub opens the app on their phone, which shows the day's shifts pulled from the scheduling software. They tap the open shift and see a list of caregivers who know the client or want more hours. One tap calls the first person on the list. If that caregiver cannot take it, the next green phone icon calls the second person. If no one is free, the Super Sub takes the shift. Each call is logged to a shared Google Sheet so the next Super Sub sees what happened.

By the time this column runs, Super Subs will be using the app. The tool allows a peer, not a manager, to solve the problem without rearranging anyone's week. Because Super Subs are regular caregivers taking a support shift, their numbers can flex as client hours rise and fall. This flexible support replaces expensive layers of management, allowing caregiver wages to grow as margins increase.