An example from Tend, the ritual app I’m building. On the left, my experience as a practitioner informing the design. On the right, the technical workflow I designed with agents to manifest that wisdom.

order of serviceOrientation to the ritual and its shape so the person knows they will be well held

ContextReminds the person why they are here; the ground the ritual stands on.

welcomePermission-giving; orients them to physical movements in ritual

GroundingCentering exercise

Somatic wisdomDeeper relaxation to help reinforce theme of rest and recuperation

practice part 2Reflection on the core experience of loss, acceptance, and patience with what is.

practice part 3Reinforce key transformation from loss to rest and healing.

benedictionAll is well. All will be well.

honor lineage & AncestorsLitany of source traditions to evoke the timelessness of these kinds of losses and the stability of these practices.

A ritual composed with Tend

Facing the Water

15 min · Without objects · Solo

“the trip your illness took from you”

Before you begin

Nothing to gather. The doorway into your living room, your recliner, and your own breath are all it uses. Start at the doorway into your living room; you’ll finish in the recliner, facing the ocean.

Ritual

The trip east is off, and with it one more plan your body reached out and quietly took back. Stand in the doorway into the living room and lean your forehead against the frame. Let the wood carry some of your weight. Stay there until your breathing slows down on its own.

Cross the room to the recliner and sit down. Tip it back until you are facing the ocean, feet up, weight fully settled into it.

Rest one hand flat on your belly, low, below the ribs. Breathe down into it slowly, so it rises and falls under your hand. Let the breath stay loose and unhurried, going nowhere in particular.

Now bring the loss into the room with you. The canceled trip. The plans your body keeps reaching out and taking back, and the life those plans were a part of. Hold it plainly and keep your eyes on the water.

Don’t argue with it or work out a way around it. On each slow breath out, let one piece of it settle in the air in front of you, out toward the ocean, where you can look at it instead of carrying it clenched. This is not to fix it and not to hurry it. It is to let the grief sit out in the open with you for a while.

Let your eyes grow heavy and your hand go slack on your belly. You have done the deliberate part.

Now let the recliner and the sound of the water take the rest, and allow yourself to drift down toward sleep if it comes. You are handing this over to something larger than your own effort. Whatever is still here when you wake, meet it then. It will keep.

The trip stays canceled and the toll stays real; you have not fixed any of it, only laid it down where the ocean can hold it beside you while you rest.

Inspired by incubation at temples of Asklepios, Epidaurus (Greco-Roman); temple-sleep of Imhotep/Serapis (Egyptian); incubation at saints’ shrines (Christian); ‘sleeping at the holy well’ (folk).

HOSTINGNext.js app on Vercel.

metadataUser selections become metadata in the Tend DB.

context inferredChat interview consumed as user context: Claude Opus 5 generates inferred summary.

CLASSIFIERSeparate API call reviews summary for emotional state then decides whether to emphasize reflective practices.

CONTEXT appliedCalls user context and adapts to known facts about user's physical environment.

RETRIEVALBefore composing, interview summary is converted to an embedding by OpenAI's text-embedding tool. Tend's knowledge corpus stored the same way: 8,105 vectors across 1,223 possible practices, which are lined up against user inputs. Top eight matches become the user-facing menu.

COMPOSEOne call to Claude Opus 4.8 returns structured JSON against a fixed schema. The ritual generation prompt, about 6,700 tokens, is assembled and cached.

CENTERPIECEBefore the model is called, a second draw chooses three physical moves, two manners of doing them, and a voice rule, from a deck of 144 tagged moves filtered to this person's mood and constraints. The model then picks one of each.

CORPUSCore practice chosen is 'Sleep on it at a place that heals', one of 1,223 practices from 57 categories. An interpretive note in the corpus requires actual sleep and a request made before sleeping, and names stalled grief as a fit.

SOURCESEach step's source copied verbatim from the practice's carefully cited and curated traditions data.

Facing the Water

Before you begin

Ritual

What the traditions know

How the machine was taught