How I Built an AI-Powered Life Book from Chinese Astrology
I recently launched a side project called GrandScheme (格局):
The idea is fairly unusual.
I wanted to explore whether traditional Chinese astrology could be turned into a modern software experience using AI.
Instead of giving someone a short horoscope-style answer, GrandScheme takes their birth information and generates a personalized Life Book (命書) based on BaZi (八字) and Zi Wei Dou Shu (紫微斗數).
The output covers areas such as personality, relationships, career, money, and life direction.
Why build this?
Chinese metaphysics has an enormous amount of traditional knowledge behind it.
But from a software perspective, there is an interesting problem:
How do you turn a complicated, culturally specific knowledge system into something that a normal user can actually interact with?
Someone who has never studied BaZi or Zi Wei Dou Shu can easily become overwhelmed by terms, charts, stars, palaces, heavenly stems, earthly branches, and different layers of interpretation.
I wanted to see whether AI could act as the bridge between the underlying system and the user.
The goal wasn't to simply build another chatbot that says:
"Based on your birth date, you are probably..."
Instead, I wanted to create something more structured — a personalized digital book that someone could come back to and explore.
The AI-first development process
One of the interesting parts of this project was how quickly I could go from an idea to a working product using an AI-first development workflow.
I used AI throughout different parts of the process — from exploring the product concept and thinking through the user experience, to writing and debugging code and iterating on features.
The workflow was roughly:
Idea → structure the knowledge → build the product → test → refine → repeat
This allowed me to experiment with ideas that would probably have taken much longer using a traditional development process.
I'm not claiming AI magically builds the whole product for you.
There is still a lot of product thinking involved.
The difficult part is deciding what the software should actually do, how the information should be structured, and how the experience should make sense to a real user.
The interesting technical problem
The part I'm most interested in exploring is the gap between structured data and generative AI.
BaZi and Zi Wei Dou Shu aren't simply collections of random text.
They have concepts, relationships, calculations, terminology, and traditional interpretive frameworks.
That creates an interesting architecture problem:
What should be deterministic, and what should be generated?
For example, some information can be calculated or structured from the user's birth data.
Other parts involve interpretation and natural-language explanation.
So there is a natural separation between:
Birth data → structured calculations → knowledge/interpretation → AI-generated explanation → personalized output
That distinction becomes important if you want the system to be consistent rather than simply asking an LLM to "tell me my fortune."
Why a Life Book?
I deliberately chose the idea of a Life Book rather than just another AI chat interface.
Chat is great for asking questions.
But I think there is something different about having a persistent artifact that belongs to you.
Instead of:
"Ask the AI something about your birth chart."
The idea becomes:
"Here is a book generated specifically around you."
You can read it, revisit it, compare different parts of your life, and use it as a starting point for self-reflection.
Whether people actually value that distinction is one of the things I'm testing now.
What's next?
GrandScheme is still very early.
Right now I'm interested in finding out whether people actually want this kind of product and which parts they find most useful.
There are also many directions I could explore:
- Better personalization
- More languages
- Relationship compatibility
- Deeper BaZi and Zi Wei Dou Shu analysis
- Different formats for the Life Book
- Subscription or premium features
- Tools for professional practitioners
- Potential B2B or licensing applications
But I don't want to build all of those before knowing what users actually want.
So for now, I'm trying to get the product in front of people and learn.
Try it
There is a free version of GrandScheme that lets you generate your basic BaZi and Zi Wei Dou Shu information.
If you're curious, you can try it here:
And if you're a developer, I'm particularly interested in your thoughts on the technical side:
How would you approach turning a traditional knowledge system into structured data and then using an LLM to generate a personalized experience without losing consistency or cultural context?
That's probably the part of this project I'm most curious to explore.
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