This Ford exec used Claude to build her family a 'chief of staff' to help keep up with daily to-do's

It’s 4 a.m., and Whitney Stefko Dover’s family “chief of staff” has already sent her the daily briefing.

It’s called the “Daily Dover.”

The early morning operations briefing helps Stefko Dover and her husband, Chris, coordinate their complicated lives with two young sons. An AI assistant scans their emails and calendar apps to map out the day ahead — school schedules, au pair or babysitter coverage, camp drop-offs, travel plans, family birthdays, recycling-bin reminders, and anything else that might otherwise rattle around in Stefko Dover’s brain until it is either handled or forgotten.

At the bottom of the email, the AI drafts two quick texts with the reminders: one to her husband and another to Sara, the family’s au pair. The texts also include affirmations.

“It sounds so silly, but it has really improved my marriage,” Stefko Dover told Business Insider. “I don’t feel resentful now around having to carry around these additional mental tasks.”

Stefko Dover, a director and senior counsel of policy and legal operations at Ford, built an assistant named Claudette using Anthropic’s tools, including Claude Code and Claude Cowork.

Her husband — who uses AI to build apps to track his supplements and finances — also told Business Insider it’s been a lifesaver.

Stefko Dover is one of a growing number of people without a coding background building AI assistants to manage the repetitive, annoying, and emotionally loaded parts of everyday life. They’ve built products that help them grocery shop or find the right foods for their families.

Instead of writing code line by line, they describe the tasks they want their agents to perform in plain English — a practice called “vibe coding.”

‘Let me figure out how to automate that’

Stefko Dover first turned to AI to help organize the family’s daily activities during a trip in March. While she was away from the family’s home in Scottsdale, Arizona, her husband asked her to make a to-do list. There were babysitters to coordinate, soccer schedules to track, and daily logistics to explain.

“I kind of thought to myself, ‘Sure, let me figure out how to automate that,'” Stefko Dover said.

That week, using her $17 a month Claude Pro subscription, she described which apps the tools should monitor and what to include in the daily email.

She quickly shipped the first version of Claudette — but it needed some editing.

Early iterations sent text messages that were far too detailed. For example, the proposed texts to her husband included hour-by-hour reminders. One prompt reminded her husband when the children should brush their teeth.

She continually adjusted the system — including through voice reminders on her Claude app on her phone — so it would tell the family what they actually needed to know: when Dover was on duty, when the au pair was taking over, which appointments or school events mattered, and what was coming up next.

She said she uses Claude enough that she often runs into the AI plan’s token limits.

She still serves as Claudette’s editor from time to time, mostly to fine-tune the affirmations into her voice. She called her system “human in the loop.”

But it’s getting much better, she said — and might not need as many edits soon.

A May 21 Claudette-drafted message to Chris began: “Good morning. It’s going to be a glorious day, day two of summer, and it’s really heating up.”

Then it moved into business: It was his mother’s birthday, and he should send a quick text or flowers, Claudette advised. Recycling also went out the next morning, and Claudette could see, via access to Stefko Dover’s Gmail, that she had recently purchased new furniture. It arrived in large cardboard boxes that needed to be broken down and discarded. And there were a lot of them.

“Your wife really has a shopping problem,” Claudette wrote, according to Stefko Dover. She kept the line in.

A personal life organizer

Stefko Dover said Claudette has helped organize two main family frontiers: birthday parties and school emails.

“There’s just 9 million birthday parties every weekend. It’s a lot to manage manually,” she said. Reminders of birthdays alone have “probably saved our marriage.”

Still, Stefko Dover said she doesn’t have specific plans to share Claudette with the world. If she were to make it available, she told Business Insider she would open-source the prompts so other families can build their own scheduling tools.

“This has been one of my greatest hacks,” she said. “It’s made things so much better, and really has alleviated a lot of the mental load I have at home.”

Stefko Dover still has to make the final call on what makes the cut for the text messages to the people in her life. But she knows that by 4 a.m. her chief of staff has already organized her family’s daily priorities.

All that’s left to do is review the slate and press send.