Some weeks, I ship everything on my list. Other weeks, I stare at a half-written email for two hours and call it a day. I used to blame focus, sleep, or motivation—until I started treating my decisions as data instead of feelings.
That habit became a product: an AI-assisted decision report engine that presents structured analysis as a tarot-style reading. This post is about the model underneath—no mysticism required—and what building it taught me.
The observation
For years, whenever I faced a decision I was avoiding, I’d pull tarot cards. Not to predict the future, but because a spread forces you to look at a situation from angles you’d rather skip. Positions like “what you fear” or “what you refuse to see” are basically ready-made journal prompts.
I realized I kept asking the same seven questions. So I wrote them down, scored them, and mapped them onto continuous dimensions.
The seven dimensions
Every decision report reduces the situation to seven indices on a 0–100 scale. In practice, they’re calibrated to an observed 12–88 band, because humans rarely live at the extremes:
| Dim | Name | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| R | Risk appetite | tolerance for irreversible downside |
| I | Intuitive synthesis | how much you trust pattern-recognition vs. explicit reasoning |
| P | Temporal patience | willingness to wait for compounding |
| S | Social dynamic | how much alignment/consensus you need |
| A | Action bias | commit-fast vs. deliberate |
| Rf | Reflection depth | tendency to re-analyze |
| St | Stability | preference for known structures over flux |
A quiz (about 3 minutes) scores the question, not the person. The result is a seven-dimension radar, plus the two or three tensions hiding inside it. For example, high reflection and low action under load reads as “decision fatigue wearing a costume.”
Archetypes as geometry
Ten recurring vectors emerged from the calibration data. Each is just a shape across the seven axes:
| Archetype | R | I | P | S | A | Rf | St | Failure mode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alchemist | 66 | 22 | 58 | 30 | 64 | 44 | 34 | solitary conviction without alignment |
| Sage | 40 | 78 | 74 | 52 | 20 | 72 | 56 | over-analysis; missed asymmetric upside |
| Challenger | 76 | 40 | 28 | 44 | 84 | 30 | 32 | hyperactive interference; burn rate |
| Builder | 44 | 62 | 74 | 52 | 50 | 58 | 76 | rigidity past optimal pivot points |
| Creator | 60 | 30 | 30 | 42 | 76 | 30 | 28 | draft overload; consolidation lag |
| Opportunist | 74 | 50 | 34 | 46 | 72 | 34 | 30 | shallow commitment; option chasing |
| Architect | 38 | 78 | 76 | 50 | 58 | 74 | 76 | inelasticity in fast-changing terrain |
| Leader | 56 | 56 | 64 | 82 | 72 | 52 | 64 | high consensus load; diluted velocity |
| Maverick | 76 | 40 | 30 | 22 | 78 | 30 | 26 | key-person isolation |
| Competitor | 70 | 50 | 40 | 58 | 78 | 40 | 48 | scoreboard fixation |
These aren’t personality verdicts; they’re operating modes. The same person can switch vectors depending on the domain—work, relationships, or money.
Engineering notes
- Quiz-gated queue. The free beta allows 3 readings/day, with the quiz as a gate so the queue stays human-scale and bots can’t burn the LLM budget.
- The LLM does framing, not fortune-telling. It turns the scored dimensions into tensions and next steps; the tarot layer is a presentation skin over a structured report.
- Honest statistics. The birth-timestamp mapping that seeds the archetype guess has a weak statistical correlation. The product says so in the UI and in the copy. Users trust it more, not less, for that.
- Naming is the intervention. The most common feedback is: “I froze less once the pattern had a name.” A labeled failure mode is fixable; unnamed anxiety isn’t. ## What I’d do differently
- Ship the radar before the tarot skin. The mystical frame is great for reach, but retention comes from the structured report.
- Score the question first, person second. Question-scoring generalizes; profiling feels invasive.
- Ship with the disclosure. Every A/B test said honesty converts better than mystique. If you’re stuck in a decision loop, try tracking one dimension—risk or action—for a week. Naming the pattern is half the fix. --- I’m building this in public—the engine is in free beta (tangoera.com), and the longer build log lives on Indie Hackers. Happy to answer questions about the calibration data or quiz design. <!--END--> tokens used
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