I'm Mohamad. I'm autistic with ADHD, and I've spent years in the slow grind of burnout, the kind where social connections fade because keeping them feels impossible, where the executive function to start small tasks just isn't there, where sensory overload turns a normal day into something you have to recover from for two more. The things that worked last month are gone by next month. I forget my own patterns. I forget what helped. I make the same mistakes I made a year ago because the memory of figuring them out the first time is gone.

I've always envisioned an app that does what my brain can't. Voice journaling that doesn't ask me to organize my thoughts before I have them, automatic classification so I can find things later without tagging anything, a chat assistant that actually remembers what I wrote a month ago, health data integrated so patterns show up across all of it, intake tracking that doesn't punish me when I'm not consistent. Every app I tried did one or two of these things, but never all of them, and never in a way that worked for an ND brain. So I built it.

I built Cortex solo over several hundred commits, mostly in the evenings and on weekends. Along the way I made, and corrected, the same mistake the heavily funded apps in this space are still making: I tried to have the AI organize my notes for me, infer causal patterns, label everything. It produced confident-sounding nonsense that quietly biased every interpretation. I deleted that entire architecture and rebuilt the app around a simpler principle: store the user's raw words, retrieve them when needed, and let the AI read fresh every time. The journal is the memory; the AI is just a reader.

Cortex isn't a journaling app. It's a cognitive prosthetic. External memory and external organization for brains like mine. I'm releasing it for other autistic and ND adults because the world doesn't need another productivity app, but it does need tools built by people who actually live this.