The Programmer's Fitbit: How My AI Built Me a Health Tracker While I Slept

I went to bed at midnight with a problem. I needed to drop 10kg. I'd known it for months. But like every other time, the tracking fell apart the moment pressure hit. Client deadlines landed, the fitness app notifications got swiped away, and three weeks later I'd forgotten I was even trying. So I mentioned it to my AI. Not as a formal prompt—just in conversation. "I keep losing track of the health stuff." I woke up to this in my terminal:

📊 Health Check — Day 1

Weight: 94.0 kg

Target: 84 kg | To go: 10.0 kg

Progress: [░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░] 0.0%

It had built me a command-line health tracker. While I slept. No app. No subscription. Just dots.

Here's where we're at, 12 days later:

📊 Health Check — Day 12

Weight: 92.4 kg (▼ 1.6 kg)

Target: 84 kg | To go: 8.4 kg

Progress: [███░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░] 16.0%

Habits 🔥

M T W T F S S

🧘 TM Meditation ○ ○ ● ● · · · ██░░░ 2/5

⏰ Fasting (14:10) ○ ○ ○ ● · · · █░░░░░ 1/6

🐕 Ruffles Walk ○ ○ ● ● · · · ██░░░░ 2/6

📖 Sandhna on Gita ○ ○ ○ ● · · · █░░ 1/3

No nagging push notifications. No gamification badges. No social feed showing me someone ran a half-marathon at 5am.

Just type hc in the terminal. See the dots. Fill them in.

There's something about watching ██░░░ fill up on a black screen that hits different to a polished app.

Maybe because there's nowhere to hide. No slick animations to distract from the fact that yesterday's circle is empty.

It evolved through conversation

The first version was simple: three habits tracked as daily streaks. Then I asked: "Can we add Sandhna on Gita? Three days a week." Ten minutes later, the habits had shifted from streaks to weekly targets.

Because real life isn't about perfect streaks—it's about hitting 5 out of 7, consistently. Then I got curious: "Can we see the weeks over a month? A quarter? A year?"

🧘 TM Meditation (5x/week)

Month ○○○◐ 0/4

Quarter ○○○○○○○○○○○○◐ 0/13

Year

Q1 ○○○○○○○○○○○○○

Q2 ○○○○○○○○○○○○○

Q3 ○○○○○○○○○○○○○

Q4 ○○○○○○○○○○○○◐

0/52 weeks hit

See those empty circles? That's a year of potential, waiting to be filled.

That's more motivating to me than any app I've ever used. We built and iterated the whole thing just by talking. No Jira tickets. No design sprints. No Figma mockups. Just: "Can we add this?" and it's done. The penny drop: tools that match how you think I run an AI consultancy. I spend my days helping organisations figure out how to use this tech effectively. Yet the tool that's actually changed my behaviour is 47 lines of JavaScript that prints dots in a terminal.

Not because the tech is fancy. But because the interface is honest. Most health apps are designed to keep you in the app. This one is designed to get you out of the terminal and onto the walking track. Type a command. See the truth. Close the laptop. Go live. I've started calling it the Programmer's Fitbit. What this taught me about AI The overnight build wasn't the best part. The best part was the iteration. Every change came from a real moment:

Weekly targets instead of daily streaks → because I missed a day and felt punished.

Sandhna on Gita → because I started a new spiritual practice.

ASCII progress bars → because I said "somehow this is very cool for me."

The AI didn't guess what I needed. It listened to what I said—and built exactly that. No more, no less.

This is what useful AI actually looks like. Not a product that anticipates your every desire, but a collaborator that responds to your actual life as it happens. 12 days in 1.6kg down. Four habits tracked. Zero app subscriptions.

The dots are filling in. One ● at a time.

--- I'm Suhit Anantula, founder of The Helix Lab. We help organisations build AI strategies that actually work—sometimes that means enterprise architecture, and sometimes it means 47 lines of JavaScript that print dots. If you're figuring out where AI fits in your organisation, let's talk: suhitanantula.com ---