u/Emojinapp

I’m in therapy and kept blanking every session. Everything I wanted to talk about would flood back on the drive home. So I built an agent to fix that.

Prelude runs a voice conversation with you before your session to surface what’s actually on your mind. Then a second agent generates a structured brief from that conversation. You bring the brief into the session and work through it with your therapist.

The interesting constraint I built around: the whole thing runs on-device. No cloud inference, no third-party APIs, no network calls at all. The agent and the TTS are fully local using Apple Intelligence. The brief generation is local too.

That constraint forced some real tradeoffs. On-device voice quality versus cloud. Local context window versus a hosted model with more headroom. I think it was the right call for the use case since someone’s pre-therapy thoughts are about as sensitive as data gets.

My therapist said our sessions genuinely improved. That was the real test.

Happy to get into the agent design in the comments.

What if death was only the end of the body and not the end of the mind?
That is not a philosophical question anymore. It is an engineering one.
Imagine a family meeting ten years from now where someone pulls up their great grandfather’s echo and asks him what he thinks about a big decision. His values, his voice, his way of seeing the world. Still accessible. Still useful.
Not a recording. A living personality model trained on who he actually was.
That is what I am building toward.

What if death was only the end of the body and not the end of the mind?
That is not a philosophical question anymore. It is an engineering one.
Imagine a family meeting ten years from now where someone pulls up their great grandfather’s echo and asks him what he thinks about a big decision. His values, his voice, his way of seeing the world. Still accessible. Still useful.
Not a recording. A living personality model trained on who he actually was.
That is what I am building toward.

(An echo is a term I coined to describe an AI model that simulates a person’s memories and personality)

What if death was only the end of the body and not the end of the mind?
That is not a philosophical question anymore. It is an engineering one.
Imagine a family meeting ten years from now where someone pulls up their great grandfather’s echo and asks him what he thinks about a big decision. His values, his voice, his way of seeing the world. Still accessible. Still useful.
Not a recording. A living personality model trained on who he actually was.
The only big question is would you actually like your memory and personality preserved and simulated for when you are gone? I’ve had mixed reaction so far, some calling it straight out of black mirror level of weird. Others thinking it’s the next frontier. What do you think?

I was in therapy for almost a year before I realized I was passive in it.

Not disengaged exactly. I showed up, I talked, I tried to be honest. But I was reactive. My therapist would ask something, I’d respond. We’d follow whatever thread came up. Some sessions felt meaningful. Others felt like I’d just reported my week to someone and gone home.

The thing I wasn’t doing was coming in with any intention. I had no real sense of what I wanted to work on. So the session would find its own shape and sometimes that shape wasn’t the thing I actually needed.

I started doing a short verbal reflection before sessions. Talking out loud to myself in the hour before, going through what had come up that week and what was actually sitting with me. It felt a bit strange at first. But it changed the dynamic noticeably.

I stopped needing the first portion of the session to just get my bearings. I’d walk in already having done some of that processing. My therapist noticed too. The sessions started going deeper faster.

Three things that actually helped:

Separating “what happened” from “what it brought up.” Easy to narrate events. Harder to identify what they stirred. The reflection made space to do that before the session so I wasn’t figuring it out in real time.

Letting myself feel it before I talked about it. There’s a version of therapy where you describe your emotions from a distance. The prep helped me actually access them rather than just report them.

Having one clear priority walking in. Not a rigid agenda, just a sense of “if we only get to one thing today, I want it to be this.” Most of the time we covered more than that, but having the anchor changed how I used the time.

Therapy is expensive and time-limited. I wish I’d thought earlier about how to actually show up to it.

Has anyone else found ways to prepare for sessions that made a difference?

There’s a specific kind of anxiety I used to get right before therapy. Not about the session itself, just this low-level panic of “I have so much to say and I don’t know where to start.”

Then I’d sit down and my therapist would ask “so how have things been?” and I’d either info-dump the entire week or go completely blank. Neither was useful. We’d spend so much time just getting oriented that by the time we got to anything real, the session was almost over.

I started doing a short verbal reflection before sessions. Nothing structured or intense, just talking through where I was at before I walked in. Out loud, on my own, usually in the 30-60 minutes before.

It did something I didn’t expect. It took the pressure off the session to be the place where I figured everything out. I’d already started that process. So when my therapist asked how things had been, I actually had an answer. A real one.

A few things that made it work:

Getting specific about what was making me anxious that week. Not just “everything” but actually naming the two or three specific things. Anxiety has a way of feeling like one giant blur. Speaking it out breaks it into actual pieces.

Noticing what I kept avoiding saying. If I’d start to mention something and then change the subject, even when talking to myself, that was usually the thing worth bringing to the session.

Deciding what I wanted from the session before going in. Support, tools, just to be heard. Having some sense of that changed how I engaged.

It didn’t fix my anxiety. But it made therapy feel like something I was doing with intention rather than something that was happening to me.

Anyone else find that the prep before a session changes how much you actually get out of it?

For a long time, I treated therapy the same way I treated most appointments. I’d show up, sit down, and wait to see what came out of my mouth.

Sometimes it was good. A lot of the time I’d leave feeling like I spent 50 minutes circling something I never quite landed on. My therapist is great. The problem was me walking in completely unprepared, carrying a week’s worth of unprocessed stuff and no real clarity on what actually needed attention.

The shift happened when I started doing a short reflection before sessions. Not journaling in the traditional sense because I can never keep that habit. More like talking through what was going on with me before I got on the couch. Almost like a warm-up.

What I noticed pretty quickly was that the first 15-20 minutes of my sessions stopped being the “catch up” phase. I’d already done that part. I’d walk in knowing the one or two things that were actually sitting heavy, and we could go straight there.

A few things that made this work for me:

Doing it close to the session. I tried doing it the night before and it didn’t stick. Doing it in the hour or so before, even in the car, made it feel connected to what I was about to do.

Saying it out loud rather than writing it. Something about speaking it makes it more real. You notice where you get stuck or where your voice changes. You can’t skim past something the way you can when you’re typing.

Asking myself one question before anything else. “What do I actually want to get out of today?” It sounds obvious but most sessions I’d never consciously asked myself that.

The sessions didn’t become perfect. Therapy is still therapy. But I started leaving feeling like I’d actually used the time, and that started to feel important.

Curious if anyone else has rituals or routines before sessions. I feel like this is something people rarely talk about but it makes a big difference in how much you get out of the work.