I live in London, but work in Pune. It's a tier 2 city, which means it carries all the chaos of a metropolis without quite enough infrastructure to absorb it. My commute to the office is short. But short doesn't mean calm.

Every morning, the road offers the same education. Horns without reason. Vehicles threading gaps that don't exist. A kind of ambient aggression that nobody seems to notice anymore, because it's just the texture of the day. It struck me at some point that nobody stops. Not physically, not mentally. There's a pressure baked into ordinary life here that most people have simply accepted as normal.

I didn't want to accept it.

I'd been experimenting with AI in my work as a product manager, curious about what becomes possible when you remove friction from thinking. So when this idea surfaced, building something to address it felt natural. Not as a side project in the traditional sense. More as a question I wanted to answer: could I build something real, by myself, that might actually help?

Hush started from a simple premise. People are overwhelmed. They don't breathe. And most wellness apps make that problem worse. Noisy, gamified, full of nudges designed to keep you inside them longer. I wanted the opposite. A space defined by what it leaves out.

I built it with Claude Code. Beyond the breathing exercises, I added a set of simple meditation techniques. Soft Focus, Body Scan, Loving-Kindness, Five Senses Grounding. Small practices that ask very little but return something real. Each one designed to be picked up in a moment and put down just as easily.

What surprised me about building with Claude Code wasn't the speed, though that was real. It was how the collaboration changed the nature of building itself. I could hold the intention, the philosophy, the feeling I wanted the app to carry, while Claude helped me execute it. The result is eight evidence-based breathing techniques, canvas animations timed to breath, and a recommender that matches technique to emotional state. All of it designed to disappear once you're in a session.

The visual language followed the same logic. Minimal. Spacious. If the interface is doing its job, you stop noticing it.

I don't think one app changes a culture. But I think individuals can choose, moment by moment, to slow down. Hush is my attempt to make that choice a little easier. To offer a pause in a world that's forgotten how to take one.