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SONDER

Presence, remembered. 

The word is Sonder.

It's the realization that every person you pass -- the one behind you in line, the one across the table you've known for years -- is carrying a story as complicated as your own. Their own ambitions, their own routines, an entire interior life that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them.

It arrives without warning, usually mid-conversation, and then it's gone. Most people feel it once and move on with their day.

This feeling always triggers something past curiosity. A real question: what made this person who they are? What shaped them? Every person you meet is the sum of a thousand things you'll never see. The world is loud, and it pulls everyone inward — toward their own noise, their own routines. It gets easy to stay insular. It gets harder to be present, to give someone the attention they actually deserve.

I've always been the kind of person who remembers the small things about people but then life got bigger and that magnet pulled me in, and I started losing the thing I used to be good at without trying. That felt like losing a piece of myself.

So I built the tool I wished existed.

How It Works

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Sonder is built around three moments.

You notice something.

You notice something you don't want to lose  and you write it down. A line, a paste, a half-formed thought. Sonder puts it where it belongs without you having to think about where that is.

It waits.

No streaks, no nagging reminder that a friendship has gone overdue. It just sits there, quietly, until the moment you actually need it.

You show up.

And when that moment comes the thread is already there. You ask the one question that proves you were paying attention. Their face changes.

That's the whole idea. Everything past this point is just the machinery underneath it.

What It Contains

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Every person gets a real profile. Photo, birthday, where you met, who their partner is, what their kids are named. A background section holds the timeless stuff -- who someone actually is, underneath what they do for a living.

Most of it runs through Quick Capture. Paste in a text thread, the conversation you just had, the name of thier pet. The AI finds the right person, pulls every detail out, and routes it to exactly where it belongs -- a note, a reminder, an update to their profile. If the person doesn't exist yet, it creates them on the spot.

Every note and every interaction gets a date and a place to live. Follow-ups you can actually check off. Birthdays, overdue check-ins, custom reminders for the dates that matter to someone specific -- no pressure, just a quiet notice on the people worth flagging.

Before a call or a coffee, or even a meeting with mutliple people in your circle, one click pulls together who someone is, what's happened recently, and what's still open between you. Talking points that are adapted to how you write and demonstrate your presence and attention.

The Creation

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I'm not a software engineer by any means. The infrastructure was built using Claude Code -- but the AI doesn't run the show. It can't decide what Sonder should be, or what's actually worth remembering about a person. I brought the ideas, the structure, the vision of what I wanted this to become. Claude Code became the tool that made it real.

What that left me with was the part that's harde to hand off: real accounts with proper authentication, each person's data fully separated from everyone else's, Stripe handling billing, an AI layer doing the routing work underneath everything -- all of it running on a server and a domain I manage myself. I cared more about getting that right than about looking impressive doing it.

There have been extensive audits, security passes, and hardening work since -- all aimed at the same thing: making sure Sonder operates at its best and safest, not just its most impressive demo.

After nearly 17,000 lines of code, Sonder was born.

This is the short version. The long one -- what it actually means to notice someone, what I was building against -- lives on the site itself.

Presence is a practice. You return to it, again and again, for everyone you care about more than you could ever hold in your head alone.

Go see what it's like to be the one someone remembers.

livewithsonder.com