The Problem No One Was Solving
Last month, my family faced one of those decisions that keeps parents up at night: which high school should I attend?
We were choosing between Lynbrook High School — a top-ranked public school that’s free — and Archbishop Mitty High School — a private Catholic school that costs roughly $135,000 over four years. The stakes felt enormous. This wasn’t choosing between pizza toppings. This was choosing the environment where I’d spend the next four years of my life, the community that would shape who I become, and potentially a $135K financial commitment.
Here’s what the decision-making process looked like before FAHS:
- School websites with marketing language instead of real data
- Scattered PDFs nobody had time to read
- Conflicting information on third-party review sites
- Family group chat messages getting buried
- Mom, Dad, and I each caring about different things but no way to see it all together
- A vague sense that we should be more systematic, but no idea how
Sound familiar? Every family goes through something like this. Most just wing it.
I decided not to.
What is FAHS?
FAHS stands for Family Academic High School System. It’s a platform I co-built with an AI agent (Claude) over two days. But calling it “a platform” undersells it. FAHS is a way of thinking about family decisions.
At its core, FAHS does three things:
1. Collects and verifies data from official sources — not marketing material, not hearsay, but actual numbers from school websites, district databases, and official documents.
2. Structures the comparison so different family members can see what matters to them — academics, athletics, finances, community sentiment, counseling support — all in one place.
3. Tracks the decision process so nothing gets lost and everyone can contribute asynchronously.
The system includes:
- A data-driven website hosted on our home NAS (accessible to the whole family)
- Automated email digests sent to Mom, Dad, and me
- A WordPress API connection to my personal blog
- An interactive course planner with UC/CSU requirement validation
- Bilingual support (English/Chinese) because my family speaks both
- Persistent memory across sessions so the AI remembers context
The Thinking Behind It
Why not just use a spreadsheet?
A spreadsheet would have been the obvious choice. But spreadsheets don’t:
- Crawl websites to verify data automatically
- Send formatted email reports to the family
- Provide an interactive dashboard everyone can access
- Track who contributed what and when
- Adapt to new questions (“Wait, what about the counselor-to-student ratio?”)
FAHS is less like a spreadsheet and more like a living research assistant that grows as our questions evolve.
Why AI?
I’m not using AI because it’s trendy. I’m using it because the alternative — doing all the research, building all the tools, writing all the code manually — would have taken months. AI compressed that into days.
But here’s the key insight: AI didn’t make the decisions. We did. The AI gathered data, built tools, and presented options. My family discussed, debated, and decided. AI was the research assistant; we were the decision-makers.
This distinction matters. Too many people think AI is about replacing human judgment. FAHS is about augmenting it — giving us better information so we can make better choices.
Why make it a system instead of a one-time analysis?
Because life doesn’t stop at the high school decision. Right now, I’m using FAHS to:
- Plan my four-year course schedule
- Track AP exam changes (AP Chinese is getting a major revision in 2027)
- Research business competitions (DECA, FBLA)
- Monitor college admission requirements
- Build my extracurricular profile
The system I built for one decision turned out to be useful for dozens of ongoing decisions. That’s the power of building infrastructure instead of doing one-off research.
What We Actually Discovered
The most valuable thing about FAHS wasn’t the technology — it was the insights that only emerged from systematic analysis:
1. Third-party data is unreliable
Five out of ten major data points from popular school review sites were wrong. Lynbrook was listed as having “20+ AP courses” everywhere, but official department pages only confirm 14. Mitty has 26. If we’d trusted the review sites, we would have been comparing fiction.
2. Different schools have different risk profiles
Lynbrook’s negative reviews cluster around mental health and academic pressure. Mitty’s cluster around administration and value-for-money. These are fundamentally different types of risk. No comparison chart captures this. You have to read the actual reviews and categorize them — which is exactly what FAHS did with 52+ reviews.
3. The counselor ratio gap is staggering
Mitty: 161 students per counselor. Lynbrook: 462 students per counselor. That’s nearly 3x better. This wasn’t on any comparison website. We only found it by digging into official school profiles.
4. Financial modeling changes everything
With a $500K education fund, choosing Lynbrook + UC leaves ~$340K remaining. Choosing Mitty + private university leaves ~$45K. That’s a $295K difference. Seeing it modeled out — not just as a tuition number but as an opportunity cost — changed how we discussed the decision.
The Bigger Question
Here’s what building FAHS made me think about: why don’t more families do this?
Every year, millions of families make major educational decisions with incomplete information, scattered across dozens of sources, discussed in rushed conversations. The tools exist to do better. AI can research. Websites can organize. Email can distribute. APIs can connect.
The missing piece isn’t technology. It’s the mindset — the willingness to treat a family decision like a project, not a gut feeling.
I’m not saying every family needs to build a custom AI-powered dashboard. But I am saying that the process of being systematic — gathering data, verifying it, structuring it, tracking it — leads to better decisions. And in 2026, AI makes that process accessible to anyone willing to try.
What’s Next
FAHS is still growing. Here’s what’s coming:
- Course planning validation — making sure my four-year plan satisfies all graduation, UC, and CSU requirements before I commit
- AP exam monitoring — tracking changes to AP Chinese (2027 revision), AP Business (new course), and other exams
- Competition tracking — DECA, FBLA, debate tournaments, and other extracurriculars
- College application prep — starting in 10th grade, building the profile systematically
The high school decision was just the beginning. FAHS is becoming the operating system for my academic life.
For Other Students
If you’re reading this and thinking “I could never build something like this” — here’s what I want you to know:
I didn’t write a single line of code myself. Not one. The AI did all the coding. What I did was:
- Identify a real problem my family had
- Ask the right questions (not “compare these schools” but “what are the different risk profiles of each school’s negative reviews?”)
- Direct the AI to build what I needed
- Verify the output against primary sources
- Make decisions based on the data
Those are the skills that matter now. Not memorizing syntax. Not grinding through tutorials. But knowing how to break a messy real-world problem into pieces, use the best available tools, and think critically about the results.
You don’t need to be a programmer. You need to be a problem-solver who isn’t afraid to build things.
FAHS is open to anyone who wants to learn from it. Visit my website at saoirse.space to follow the journey.
Built collaboratively with Claude (Anthropic). I directed the architecture, defined requirements, and made all decisions. The AI handled research, coding, and deployment. This is what human-AI collaboration looks like in practice.
