I m the maker behind LoveActually.ai. During our beta, we made a controversial product decision that split our team, and I want to hear your take.
Most AI companions (like ChatGPT or Pi) are RLHF-tuned to be supportive, polite, and agreeable. But in the dating world, we found that "politeness" was actually hurting our users. They didn't need a cheerleader; they needed a wake-up call.
So, we built Astute Kitty. We engineered its system prompt to prioritize "rational critique" over "emotional safety." It calls users out when their dating standards don't match their own profiles.
The hardest part of building an AI matchmaker wasn t the model. It was deciding what not to optimize. From an engineering perspective, it s very easy to make a dating product look alive : more swipes, more matches, more notifications. The harder problem was building systems that could: tolerate silence slow down recommendations and still be confident in a match We spent a surprising amount of time designing memory and decay: what the system should remember about a person, what it should forget, and when it should wait instead of acting. Astute Kitty doesn t just score compatibility it reasons about timing, emotional readiness, and communication rhythm. Loving Kitty exists for a simple technical reason: emotional context doesn t fit neatly into state machines. Building this forced us to treat users less like traffic and more like long-running processes with history. It s slower. It s less impressive in dashboards. But it feels more honest. LoveActually wasn t built to feel busy. It was built to feel calm.
I m the CTO at LoveActually. I ve spent most of my career building recommendation systems, and dating apps have always bothered me from an engineering standpoint.
Most of them are optimized for engagement: swipe more, match more, keep you coming back. But very few are built to help two people actually build something that lasts.
Two months ago, I'd never heard of Product Hunt. When I told people we were launching @AI Context Flow here, they told me to keep my expectations in check.
Fast forward to today: #1 Product of the Day and #1 Productivity Tool of the Week.
The journey was chaotic, humbling, and honestly surreal. If you'd told me this would happen, I wouldn't have believed you.
To everyone who upvoted, commented, and cheered us on: Thank you. Your support means everything and keeps us building. If you need any tips on how we pulled this off as complete first-timers, ask your specific questions below
