u/Thin_Sky

My extended family drove me to the airport and were told they are not allowed to enter because "there are a lot of people going to Saudi Arabia to pray so only passengers with tickets can enter." This is a direct quote from the police officer when I asked what was going on.

Can someone explain this to me? I'm inside the airport and it's nearly completely empty. Is this a normal thing? I hope it's not offensive to ask this question. I'm just trying to understand.

I posted my AI concierge infographic to Reddit. The post was about the concierge I built for my wedding guests, but a surprising number of people asked the same follow-up question: how did I generate the image? I promised I'd write a post detailing how, and this is it.

(Mods I apologize if this isn't allowed.)

My wife is Mauritian, I'm American, we live in Canada. We just had our Hindu wedding in Mauritius — 4 events (Haldi/Mehendi, Sangeet, Ceremony, Reception) (more if you include bachelor party and some side events), up to 300+ guests, 17 international travelers flying in from 4 different countries. Most of them had never been to a Hindu wedding or set foot in Mauritius.

I'm a software developer, so I built an app to help coordinate everything. I will not share the name of the app or any links to it as I don't want the post to be removed. Some of what I learned applies whether you use tech or not.

You cannot make people read things

I had an events page with every detail — venues, times, dress codes, directions. Guests wouldn't look at it. They'd text me. I'd say "it's in the app." They'd say "oh I didn't check."

What finally worked: I started creating visual schedule cards and dress code explainers and sending them directly into WhatsApp groups. People read images in the chat they're already in. They do not open a separate app or website to find information, no matter how well-organized it is.

If you're relying on your wedding website for communication, also push the critical stuff into your group chats as images. Don't assume anyone will go look.

Dress code visuals saved us

Nearly all of our international guests had never heard words like sherwani, kurta, or lehenga. Telling them "wear a kurta to the Ceremony" meant nothing. I added photos of each item next to the dress code for each event and turned it into a packing list. Multiple guests specifically told me this was the single most helpful thing we did. Several said it reduced their anxiety significantly.

If you're having a cultural wedding with guests from outside that culture, don't just name the outfit. Show them what it looks like and where to buy it.

Timezones will break your brain and your guests' brains

Our guests came from 4 time zones. Mauritius is UTC+4. When it's Wednesday afternoon there, it's still Tuesday night in Seattle. I tried a clever toggle that switched between "wedding time" and "local time." People forgot which mode they were in and got confused.

In the end, I just showed both times everywhere. Slightly cluttered, much less confusing. If you have international guests, always show the event time in the local wedding timezone AND their home timezone. Don't make them do math.

Arrange airport transport and confirm it loudly

We coordinated drivers for every arriving guest. One guest landed at 5:30am on a delayed flight, panicked, tried calling me. I was asleep. The driver was waiting with their name on a card, exactly as we'd told them. Guest got to the hotel without issue. I slept through it.

The key was sending a notification beforehand saying exactly what to expect: "When you exit arrivals, look for a driver holding a card with your name. The car is already arranged and paid for." Removing ambiguity in advance meant I didn't have to be awake at 5:30am.

Have one source of truth and defend it

The night before our events started, the family sat down to finalize the schedule. Everyone had a different version. I pulled up the app and said "here's what we agreed to last week." We made a few swaps, finalized it in 15 minutes, and I sent the updated version to everyone immediately.

Doesn't matter if your source of truth is an app, a Google Doc, or a notebook. Pick one, keep it updated, and don't let side conversations in WhatsApp become the de facto plan.

The thing nobody tells you about multi-event weddings

Each event has its own venue, its own dress code, its own guest list, its own timing, and its own set of things that will change last minute. The Haldi start time changed day-of from 4:30 to 4:00pm. Being able to push that update out instantly and have it reach everyone was the difference between 300 confused guests and everyone showing up on time.

Build a system where you can broadcast a change to all guests in under 2 minutes.

If anyone is planning a Hindu or South Asian destination wedding and wants to compare notes, happy to answer questions. It was the best week of our lives and also the most logistically complex thing I've ever done. Both Mauritian guests and international guests said it was the best wedding they've ever experienced (I think this was because everyone just mixed together so amazingly well). I'm so incredibly proud of what we accomplished and would love to answer any questions.

My wife is Mauritian, I'm American, we live in Canada. We just had our Hindu wedding in Mauritius — 4 events (Haldi/Mehendi, Sangeet, Ceremony, Reception) (more if you include bachelor party and some side events), up to 300+ guests, 17 international travelers flying in from 4 different countries. Most of them had never been to a Hindu wedding or set foot in Mauritius.

I'm a software developer, so I built an app to help coordinate everything. Some of what I learned applies whether you use tech or not.

You cannot make people read things

I had an events page with every detail — venues, times, dress codes, directions. Guests wouldn't look at it. They'd text me. I'd say "it's in the app." They'd say "oh I didn't check."

What finally worked: I started creating visual schedule cards and dress code explainers and sending them directly into WhatsApp groups. People read images in the chat they're already in. They do not open a separate app or website to find information, no matter how well-organized it is.

If you're relying on your wedding website for communication, also push the critical stuff into your group chats as images. Don't assume anyone will go look.

Dress code visuals saved us

Nearly all of our international guests had never heard words like sherwani, kurta, or lehenga. Telling them "wear a kurta to the Ceremony" meant nothing. I added photos of each item next to the dress code for each event and turned it into a packing list. Multiple guests specifically told me this was the single most helpful thing we did. Several said it reduced their anxiety significantly.

If you're having a cultural wedding with guests from outside that culture, don't just name the outfit. Show them what it looks like and where to buy it.

Timezones will break your brain and your guests' brains

Our guests came from 4 time zones. Mauritius is UTC+4. When it's Wednesday afternoon there, it's still Tuesday night in Seattle. I tried a clever toggle that switched between "wedding time" and "local time." People forgot which mode they were in and got confused.

In the end, I just showed both times everywhere. Slightly cluttered, much less confusing. If you have international guests, always show the event time in the local wedding timezone AND their home timezone. Don't make them do math.

Arrange airport transport and confirm it loudly

We coordinated drivers for every arriving guest. One guest landed at 5:30am on a delayed flight, panicked, tried calling me. I was asleep. The driver was waiting with their name on a card, exactly as we'd told them. Guest got to the hotel without issue. I slept through it.

The key was sending a notification beforehand saying exactly what to expect: "When you exit arrivals, look for a driver holding a card with your name. The car is already arranged and paid for." Removing ambiguity in advance meant I didn't have to be awake at 5:30am.

Have one source of truth and defend it

The night before our events started, the family sat down to finalize the schedule. Everyone had a different version. I pulled up the app and said "here's what we agreed to last week." We made a few swaps, finalized it in 15 minutes, and I sent the updated version to everyone immediately.

Doesn't matter if your source of truth is an app, a Google Doc, or a notebook. Pick one, keep it updated, and don't let side conversations in WhatsApp become the de facto plan.

The thing nobody tells you about multi-event weddings

Each event has its own venue, its own dress code, its own guest list, its own timing, and its own set of things that will change last minute. The Haldi start time changed day-of from 4:30 to 4:00pm. Being able to push that update out instantly and have it reach everyone was the difference between 300 confused guests and everyone showing up on time.

Build a system where you can broadcast a change to all guests in under 2 minutes.

If anyone is planning a Hindu or South Asian destination wedding and wants to compare notes, happy to answer questions. It was the best week of our lives and also the most logistically complex thing I've ever done. Both Mauritian guests and international guests said it was the best wedding they've ever experienced (I think this was because everyone just mixed together so amazingly well). I'm so incredibly proud of what we accomplished and would love to answer any questions.

I built a wedding planning app with two Gemini-powered agents: one for me (planning), one for guests (concierge). The concierge had read access to events, schedules, venues, dress codes, transport info, and guest profiles via MCP tools. 17 international guests used it over ~10 days. Here's what I learned that I haven't seen discussed much in this space.

Trust calibration is an unsolved UX problem

The AI was mostly accurate. Didn't matter. Guests constantly asked me to verify what it told them. I tried two interventions:

1. A "The groom says:" card that appeared when the answer came from something I literally hand-wrote
2. A collapsible "How I figured this out" card that showed the source snippet the AI reasoned from

Neither worked well enough. Users couldn't build a mental model of when to trust the AI, so they defaulted to not trusting it. I think the core issue is that we're asking users to do per-response trust evaluation, which is cognitively expensive. They'd rather just text a human.

If anyone has seen good patterns for communicating AI confidence to non-technical users, I'm genuinely interested.

One bad output poisons the whole system

I built a flight-ticket parser. Guest uploads itinerary photo/PDF, the agent extracts arrival time, asks the user to confirm. A few users reflexively said "yep!" without checking. Wrong times got persisted.

The interesting part: this wasn't a hallucination problem. The AI sometimes miscalculated timezone conversions across multi-leg international flights (e.g., Vancouver → Paris → Mauritius, crossing the dateline). But the downstream effect was that the entire flight tracking feature lost credibility, and I had to fall back to a manual spreadsheet. One class of error collapsed trust in an unrelated class of correct outputs.

Confirmation prompts are security theater with real users

"Can you confirm this is correct?" feels like a safeguard. In practice, users treat it as a loading screen. They say yes to move forward. If your agent flow depends on a human verification step, assume ~30% of users will skip it. Design accordingly — maybe require the user to re-enter the critical value rather than just approve it.

The agent's best use wasn't what I designed it for

I built the concierge to answer guest questions. Its most valuable function ended up being content generation. I'd tell it to produce schedule cards, dress code explainers with visual descriptions, transport instructions — formatted for the wedding's visual theme — which I then dropped into WhatsApp groups. The agent as a content engine outperformed the agent as an interface by a wide margin.

This maps to a pattern I think is underappreciated: for most non-technical users, the right interaction model isn't "talk to the AI." It's "the AI produces artifacts that a trusted human distributes through channels users already trust."

Your users' #1 activity will be jailbreaking

The majority of concierge sessions were guests trying to make it say something it shouldn't. Nobody succeeded (I'll do a separate post on how I set up the guardrails), but it was far and away the most popular use case. If you're deploying an agent to a group that includes software developers, budget time for this.

Stack for the curious: FastAPI, Gemini, MCP tool server, Retell AI + Twilio for voice, React, served as a PWA. Happy to go deeper on any of this.

"The app" is named aiDo (or aido). This post will serve more as a product briefing and I will make subsequent follow-up posts that get more technical.

My wife and I live in Canada. My wife is from Mauritius and I'm from the US. We had our Hindu wedding in her home country of Mauritius.

Some quick stats for context: International Guests: 17 total, including 2 children under age of 5.

4 from Canada 2 from France 8 from USA 3 from Netherlands

Number of total guests at each event Haldi/Mehendi: 71 Sangeet: 400 Ceremony: 170 Reception: 150

I built the app for two reasons:

1. I wanted an AI that could act as a concierge for my international guests. Only 2 of our international guests had ever been to a Hindu wedding or even stepped foot in Mauritius. I wasn't going to be able to personally help all my guests navigate their arrival, day to day activities, transport to/from hotels, airports and event venues. And I definitely didnt want to personally answer the infinite redundant questions I knew I would receive via whatsapp in the days leading up to the wedding. For example, each event has a different dress code; something like "Please wear a sherwani to the Sangeet." Before our wedding, most of my international guests had never even heard the words sherwani or Sangeet. It was clear I would need something more powerful than a FAQ.

2. I wanted an AI that could help me plan the wedding. Mauritius is a small (rapidly) developing island nation off the coast of Madagascar. It's a a 35 hour commute from where I live. When it's 2pm at my house in Canada, it's 1am in Mauritius. Traditional Hindu weddings consist of several events across multiple days and sometimes involve thousands of guests (ours was small and at max only had 400 guests). I needed a way asynchronously coordinate the planning of 4 different wedding events with my wife's family who live in Mauritius.

The idea: build an event planning app with all the typical featuyres you'd expect from such a service: guest lists, guest roles, RSVPS, events, venues, vendors, task lists, dress codes. Build an MCP server that hooks into all of those various endpoints. Create two AI agents: one for planning and one for being a guest concierge and expose a different subset of MCP tools to each.

I'd be able to upload meeting transcripts, csv's, photos of guest lists, etc to the ai and it would automatically update the necessary items in the app.

Come wedding time, the concierge would be given read access to many of those things in order to answer questions for guests.

What Didn't Work

1. I failed to onboard my Wife's parents who were the main planners in Mauritius

Older generation Mauritians (including my wife's parents who would serve as the point people during planning) are not as familiar with tech as younger Mauritians. They prefer pen and paper, excel spreadsheets, random whatsapp messages spread across numerous groups, impromptu phone calls, etc.

For this reason, I knew id need to make getting the app and registering/logging in as simple as possible.

I initially opted for an OTP via email with an extremely long expiration date. I'd send a user an invitation link where they'd then enter their email, receive the OTP and then they'd be logged in forever. Any time they went to the page it would automatically have them logged in.

This wound up being confusing for my wife's parents (I still need to find out why). Naturally, I was asleep when they tried it and gave up. I eventually switched to google OAUTH and it made things much easier, but it was already too late. My wife's parents didn't try to login again until I arrived in Mauritius a week before the wedding. This one decision meant the two most important planners in Mauritius didn't use the app for planning. Ouch.

Since my wife's parent's wouldnt be using the app, I quickly pivoted and prepared to act as the sole ingester of data into the system. I made it possible to upload any kind of digital content to the ai chat so it could update things for me.

The flow became: have call with parents --> record meeting and collect any spreadsheets and photos of handwritten notes --> upload these artifacts to the ai chat --> ai correctly updates things. This also failed. I don't speak fluent Mauritian Creole. It's manageable, but it certainly wasn't good enough for me to catch all the nuance required during intricate planning.

So the flow ACTUALLY became: my wife has a call with her parents in Creole --> record meeting and collect any spreadsheets and photos of handwritten notes --> She helps translate the information to me --> I upload these artifacts to the ai chat --> ai correctly updates things.

As you can imagine, this was an inefficient flow and information regularly fell through the cracks. If I missed a call or a single decision point in a whatsapp chat, or if my wife forgot to mention some new information to me, that information wouldn't get into the app.

2. Datetime difficulties eroded trust

Imagine you're a guest that lives in Seattle. You get invited to the Haldi event which takes place on Wednesday May 2, 1pm Mauritius time. In Seattle time, that's Tuesday May 1, 2am. Now imagine you have to take a call while youre in Mauritius. The call is scheduled for Wednesday May 2, 2pm Seattle time. Is there going to be a conflict between this call and the wedding? No. Because in Mauritius it will already be Thursday. (Don't feel bad if youre confused).

Now remember that my international guests came from all over the place, some of them have never crossed the international dateline. How do I display the date and time of events in a way that's intuitive for the guests so they can plan accordingly?

I didn't want to clutter the UI with multiple dates and times.

For example: Apr 25, 2026, 1:00 AM GMT+4 / Apr 24, 2026 2:00 PM PDT

My solution was to add a toggle in the settings that switches between your local timezone and wedding timezone. Wedding time meant that all datetimes were displayed in Mauritian time. I think this wound up being a bad decision.

People (including myself) sometimes forgot the toggle was set to Wedding time and would forget to switch it back to local time, leading to confusion.

In the end I decided to just stick with the dual timezone display, even though it was slightly more cluttered.

Another scenario: I wanted to arrange for shuttles for our guests to get from the airport in Mauritius to their hotel. This means they needed to tell me when they would be landing. Imagine you're a guest. Your flight is on April 27 1pm from Vancouver. It lands in Paris the next morning at 7 am. You have a ten hour layover before your next flight which lands in Mauritius the next morning at 7:30 am. What day/time are you landing? This might seem simple, but trust me when I say it's easy to mess up.

In an effort to make things easier, I made a skill for the concierge ai to ingest photos/pdfs of flight tickets and calculate and store their arrival time. Part of this flow involved the ai first asking the user to confirm that the time it calculated was correct. I hoped this would mitigate any errors caused by the AI miscalculating.

It didn't.

A few users simply said "yep! looks good!" without checking, and the AI happily persisted incorrect arrival times in the system.

Thankfully a few of those guests actually caught it early, informed me, and we wound up asking all users to triple check their arrival times. We also created a separate fallback spreadsheet as the source of truth for flight data, which I then manually inserted into aido, which I then needed to manually transcibe back into hard copy for my wfie's father when we arranged transport.

I'm still thinking about how this could have been done better.

3. Photo Gallery Adoption was Ephemeral

I made a little social hub so that guests could share their location, their status, their contact info, their role in the wedding, and any photos they took. Users could select an event and upload photos to it, download photos, comment and react. Because I knew onboarding was already proving to be an issue with Mauritian guests, I also made an anonymous gallery page for non-registered users. We shared a link to this page in whatsapp chats and had scannable qr codes on cards that we placed in key spots at the events.

Some guests adopted the photo gallery for a day or two, especially during preparations and during travel. But for whatever rerason, it quickly reverted back to whatsapp. In the end, we now have hundreds of photos spread across at least 6 different whatsapp group chats.

I'll discuss why I think this happened below, but basically it felt like opening aido to download/upload photos was a step extra when everyone was already in whatsapp.

4. Push Notifications were Absent

I purposefully chose to not publish the app in any app stores and instead served it as a progressive web app, thinking people wouldn't want to have to download an app.

That was a foolish decision.

Literally none of the users knew how to install PWAs from their browser without me showing them. This meant push notifications were rendered useless.

After the wedding, several guests specifically said that receiving push notifications would have reminded them to use the app more. Without it, they gravitated back to whatsapp.

5. The AI

The AI itself worked most of the time, aside from a couple incorrect answers. However, the problem wound up not being hallucinations. Rather there were two issues:

a. users didn't trust the ai and didnt know when they could trust the ai.

I cannot tell you the amount of times people asked me a question that was prefaced with "I asked the aido ai and it gave me an answer but i wanted to double check with you." I specifically tried to avoid this problem by showing in the UI when the ai was pulling information from our knowledge pools. I also included a feature called "The groom says:" where I added specific hand written opinions and information that the ai would let the user know that I literally wrote it. And yet somehow there was still trust issue.

The cause was probably twofold in that it had previously hallucinated something so trust was eroded and also that I did a poor job of educating users HOW the ai works, so they could know when it could be trusted.

b. by far, the VAST majority of sessions with the ai involved guests trying to jailbreak and hack it

The logs are quite funny and Ill make a post dedicated to this alone. I don't know why everyone was obsessed with this. It could be simply that some of my guests were fellow software developers. Or maybve its just natural instinct for people to try to break things. I'm happy to report that nobody succeeded in jailbreaking the AI (ill explain how in a future post).

It's nice to know that if aido doesnt suceed as a product, at least there's potential for pivoting it to a very strange hacking game.

6. Sometimes guest just would not read the app

There were A LOT of conversations I had that went like this:

guest: hey where is the Haldi? me: its in the app on the event page. guest: (admission of guilt in having never even bothered to check the event page)

I think this is universal. You can't make people read things. I hoped the ai chat feature would mitigate this, but it didn't. By the end of the week, I started using the AI to actually make images of event schedules or other important updates which I would then spam into all the WhatsApp groups. The ai knows our wedding 'theme' so the images it created were actually quite nice. This was probably the most important thing I learned, and I'll discuss it more in the final section.

What Worked

aido as the system of record

aido DID succeed as a source of truth. In one occasion, the family sat down the night before the events started to finalize roles and the day-of schedules for each event. Suddenly everyone was trying to communicate a schedule that nobody could agree was right. I pulled up the aido event schedule and said: Here's what we decided on the other day. We huddled around the laptop and discussed. In the end we decided to swap the timing of a few things which was simple. I then told the ai to produce an image of the schedule which I sent to everyone (as described above in #6).

Dashboard and Quick References

Every user has their own dashboard with the schedule, any tasks assigned to them, any notifications I've sent out, and some quick reference items. People needed to pay us back for several things. I added three different sets of bank details that people could easily reference to transfer us money. We only wound up getting one question about this in the end, and a simple "check the app" was all that was needed.

Airport transport system

We arranged tranbsport for every guest from the airport to their accomodations. I sent a notification to all users informing them what to look for on arrival. One of our guests arrived at 530 am on a delayed flight. They panicked, wondering if the driver would still be waiting. They tried to call me. I knew everything was taken care of already so I had my phone on silent. The guest walked out, saw their name on the driver's card where we said they would be, got to the hotel without issue. Best of all I got to sleep uninterrupted.

Packing Lists

As mentioned at the start, nearly all of our international guests had never been to a hindu wedding. They had no idea what to wear, and even when we told them what to wear, they didnt know what it meant. So I made a feature in the aido that lets me create a packing list template for all guests. I also added the ability for the ai to generate the template based on the event schedules and information. I also added a feature where I could upload photos of what the dress code meant. This meant every user had a packing list, organized by event, and images for each so they could understand visually what "kurtas" and "lahengas" look like. Many of the guests specifically mentioned how useful this was for them in reducing anxiety or what to wear.

Event time change notification

The day of the Haldi, we realized we needed to change the start time from 430 to 4 pm. I used the app to send an inbox notification which appeared on every user's dashboard page, stating the new start time. As a safety measure, I also sent a message to everyone on whatsapp. Everyone came to the Haldi on time.

What I learned

1. One bad data point poisons trust. A UX issue (not even a data bug) wound up undermining the entire flight tracking feature, causing it to be partially abandoned in favor of a manual spreadsheet.

2. Meet the user where they are. People didn't want to read the events page for information. They also didn't want to ask the AI. They were in whatsapp and they wanted to know the address of the Haldi venue. The best way to communicate needs to users was to send the information to them, rather than forcing them to come to the app.

3. The AI in aido is more powerful as a content engine, NOT a guest interface. The aido ai worked fine for planning purposes, but guests are not ready to trust ai yet and even then we still have to grapple with problem #2 above. I think I found a really powerful pattern when I started telling the ai to make infographics for me that I then manually shared with whatsapp groups.

What I've done

I'm going to continue having ai help hosts plan the wedding. I think the AI concierge feature is still useful as well, as there are genuinely times where users need to ask it specific questions. But I've now added functionality for it to also become a content producer and distributor.

The revised flow is now:

1. ai and host plan the wedding together
2. ai works with the host to draft content (agenda cards, schedule cards, dress-code explainers, transport instructions, reminders, etc)
3. host approves, revises, rejects content
4. host and ai set schedules for when and what content will be distributed, to whom, and how. In this way, we meet the users where they are (whether thats the app, whatsapp, email, text message, etc.)
5. aido application automatically sends the content

Users can still login to aido and do everything they could previously, including speaking with the ai. But the big change is that I've augmented the system so we can bring the information to guests when they need it, rather than the other way around.

Tldr: there's no tldr because I hand wrote this. You can go to the aido Instagram page to see some infographics I generated that tell the story: https://www.instagram.com/aido_wedding?igsh=ajIybXk4dXR3Zmhn