DEV Community: Romi ADHD

This week at Romi #2 - Latency and Voice AI

Vlad B. — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:23:59 +0000

Welcome back to ~~This~~ Last week at Romi. We've been really busy so this post hits a bit late than our scheduled Friday one!

In Voice AI, saving 200–300 milliseconds sounds tiny on paper. In practice, it’s the difference between an awkward robotic delay and a natural conversation.
This week, we took a hard look at our pipeline to eliminate latency and clean out old code that was getting in the way. Here is what we changed:

Sync to Async Tools: Originally, tool execution was synchronous. When a user created a task, the pipeline froze waiting for database writes. Making our tools asynchronous means the voice keeps flowing naturally while items are saved in the background.
7 Dedup Layers Down to 2: To stop duplicate tasks from hitting the database, we kept piling on safeguards over time until we had 7 layers of deduplication. They slowed down the pipeline and began contradicting each other. With stronger prompt reinforcement and a quick backend cleanup, we cut that down to just 2 layers.
Ditching "Thinking" Models: Since our agent relies heavily on fast tool calls, thinking models added unnecessary reasoning delay before speaking. We swapped to a model optimized strictly for speed and accurate tool invocation.
Push-to-Talk Toggle: To complement these backend speedups, we added a toggle between Natural Flow and Push-to-Talk. Now users can think out loud or speak in noisy rooms without the model prematurely triggering unwanted tasks.

Sometimes performance wins aren't about writing complex new code—they're about deleting redundant safeguards, running tasks in the background, and picking the right model for the job.

What's the worst bit of legacy "safety code" you've had to clean out of your stack?

By Vlad - CTO@RomiADHD

This week at Romi #1 - OTA updates

Vlad B. — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 06:21:04 +0000

We finally added OTA updates to Romi.

This is something apps have been doing for years, but it’s new territory for us.

Instead of waiting for Apple’s review every time we need to push a small fix, we can now ship certain updates directly to users.

And because apparently paying for another service wasn’t exciting enough, we built our own setup using Capgo + CDN.

It’s one of those things that feels obvious once it works. Getting there was slightly less obvious. 😅

What’s something your team implemented way later than everyone else?

By Vlad - CTO@RomiADHD

Hello from Romi!

Vlad B. — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 04:51:57 +0000

Hey this is Vlad, the CTO. We’ve been quietly building Romi for a while, so we figured it was probably time to stop hiding in the codebase.

Romi thinks like you do. Voice-first, ADHD-first. Capture thoughts, build routines, and actually stick to them. Your brain deserves a companion that keeps up.

I'm not trying to promote anything but to share what we’re building, the things we learn along the way, technical decisions, experiments, and probably a healthy amount of “well, that broke.”

We’re especially interested in exploring what happens when AI becomes something you actually work with every day, rather than just another chatbot in a browser tab.

If you’re building with AI, working on developer tools, or just enjoy watching other developers make questionable architectural decisions, welcome.

Ask me anything in the comments.