Why we built Vyzrly
College admissions is one of the most consequential processes in a young person's life, and one of the most opaque.
Students spend months on applications. Essays, recommendations, test scores. Then everything goes into a system they cannot see, run by people they will never meet, judged on criteria that are only partially public. The student waits. The school takes its time. Almost no information is available about how the decision actually gets made.
We built Vyzrly because we thought students deserved better information than that. Not predictions. The thing a student actually wants is not a number that says "you have a 78% chance." A probability bar like that is false precision. The thing they want is a clear read on where they actually stand. What schools have admitted students like them in recent years. Where their profile is strong. Where it is weaker than they think. What is missing that could still be added.
The intelligence is real. It comes from patterns in actual admissions outcomes, not made up. But the output is plain English on the page. We removed probability scores from the design on purpose, because the false precision turned out to be worse than no information at all. Anxiety dressed up as data.
The goal was never to help students game the system. It was to help them understand the system well enough to make better decisions with the time they have left.
Admissions has uncertainty in it that no tool can remove. Vyzrly does not pretend to. It just makes the parts that are knowable visible to the person whose life this actually is.
Related project
Vyzrly
College admissions, clarified.
Other notes
We measured our own em dashes, then banned them anyway
The data says density is the tell, not presence, and our prose was already under the human baseline. We adopted the stricter rule regardless. Here is the argument that beat the evidence.
Admissions stopped trying to detect, and started changing the format
Universities are switching off their AI detectors, not upgrading them. The interesting part is what they are replacing them with, and what it asks of a seventeen-year-old.
Who supplied the judgment
The provenance conversation has moved from whether a machine wrote something to who decided. We have been shipping an answer to that question, per product, in public, for a while now. Here is what it cost us to keep it honest.
We do not know how many people use it
Privacy-first is the most crowded claim in mobile right now. Ours cost us the ability to answer the first question anyone asks about a product, and we would rather describe that cost than the feature.
The gate that passed by never running
We spent a week building checks that guard our writing and our code. Four of them reported clean while checking nothing at all. Every one was found by running something, and none by reading the code.
Why we built Tennis Tutor
A junior player gets an hour of correction a week and then practises for six. The scarce thing is not court time. It is someone watching closely enough to tell you what you actually did.
Why we built Myeiyo
Chore apps either turn kids into tiny investors or turn chores into a video game. Neither matches what actually happens in a house. We built the one that does.
The decisions that don't iterate
Most things you build are reversible. A few are not. Telling them apart is harder than it sounds, and getting it wrong is what most software regret turns out to be.
What 'honest software' means in practice
We use the phrase a lot. It is easy to say. It is harder to specify.
When AI is the wrong tool
The reflex to reach for AI on every problem is a symptom of taste failure, not technical sophistication.
Why we built Glossem
Product copy lives inside code. That is a problem for everyone who is not an engineer.
Why we built USACO Tutor
Competitive programming builds a kind of thinking that matters. We wanted to make that more accessible.
Why we built ChessWarp
Every chess app asks you to find the best move. In real games, nobody tells you there is one. That gap is where most club players are stuck, and it is what we set out to fix.
Why we built Break the Test
The SAT has seven versions in circulation. Serious students burn through them in a month. The bigger problem is that even unlimited practice would not fix the thing that actually costs them points.