Mr8Bit.devI’m constantly overwhelmed by the tasks that sit outside my working day. Despite the rapid advances in AI over the past couple of years, managing my emails and tasks hasn’t become much easier. If anything, technology has made it easier to get more information, and harder to decide what deserves my attention.
We used to get paper notices to sign for upcoming school events: a flu vaccination, a gala, a school excursion. Now, those requests are mixed into an endless stream of school notices, ranging from urgent to routine. The information is there. Keeping track of what actually needs doing is another matter.
Maybe it’s a matter of time until we have an AI agent that handles all this for us. Maybe schools will adopt a notification system that makes priorities clear. Until then, at least for the schools my children attend, I’m using ClassEz.
It started with a few simple questions
I built ClassEz to get a clearer view of my kids’ schedules, keep up with deadlines, and celebrate their achievements.
My wife and I started using a barebones version last year. It had one simple, important function: a chatbot that could answer questions about school notices.
“When is the school trip?”
“What should the kids pack?”
“Do I need to sign up for it?”
Those are small questions, but answering them usually means finding the right notice, reading through it, and checking whether something has changed since it was sent.
Over time, I’ve added automatic event and to-do extraction using named entity recognition (NER), merit notifications, and more. I’ve made it look more fun, too. What started as a chatbot has gradually become a more useful way for us to keep up with school life.
A useful reason to keep learning
ClassEz is also an experiment in context engineering: giving AI the relevant information it needs to help. The aim is to build something useful and secure that makes managing our time a little easier.
Technically, it’s a place to explore embeddings, semantic search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which brings relevant information from school notices into the chatbot’s answers. It’s also taken me through storage optimization, progressive web apps, Android and Apple app store deployment, Supabase, Expo, and React Native.
It’s my way of keeping my curiosity and creativity alive, in the spare time I have outside my day job :)
Starting with my community
I hope ClassEz makes school life a little easier for parents in my community. With time, I’d love to support more schools in Hong Kong and beyond.
For now, it starts with my family, our school notices, and a few everyday questions that should be easier to answer.