Custom Personal Software: Cat Mealtime Reminders

The Problem

Finn and Gus, my two cats, each have their own automatic feeder. The feeders are great. Food drops at the same time every day, no missed meals. But the feeders have one flaw: their built-in reminder chimes go off exactly when the food dispenses. If the cats aren’t already sitting in front of their feeders at that moment, they hear the sound from across the house, scramble to find it, and end up competing at whichever feeder they reach first.

Finn eats special food, so he always has to eat from his own feeder.

The fix felt obvious: play an announcement 20 seconds before the food drops so they each know to go stand by their own feeder, calm and ready.

The Alexa app lets you set reminders, but only down to the minute, not the second. Since my feeders fire at :00 seconds, I needed reminders at :40 seconds.

The Solution

I described the problem to ChatGPT and asked what the options were. The answer: build a private custom Alexa skill using the Alexa Developer Console. It’s free, it’s private (only visible to my Amazon account), and the Alexa Reminders API accepts times down to the second.

The process, at a high level:

  1. Created a private Alexa skill in the Amazon Developer Console, named it “Finn and Gus Feeding,” and set it up as a custom skill with Alexa-hosted Node.js (Amazon hosts the Lambda function for free).
  2. Set up a voice intent so I could trigger it by saying “Alexa, open feeding reminders” -> “set the feeding reminders.”
  3. Enabled the Reminders permission on the skill and granted it in the Alexa app, which gives the skill API access to create reminders on the device.
  4. Got a small Node.js function from ChatGPT that calls the Alexa Reminders API to create three recurring daily reminders at exactly 8:59:40, 12:29:40, and 18:34:40 Eastern time, each saying: “Finn and Gus, it’s time to eat!”
  5. Deployed it, ran the intent once, and the three reminders were created. They repeat daily.

Now, 20 seconds before each feeding, Alexa announces it to the house. Finn goes to his feeder, Gus goes to his, and the food arrives right on schedule.

The Bigger Point

This took about 10 minutes. I didn’t read any docs or write any code. There were two small hiccups along the way and ChatGPT debugged both of them instantly.

I’m not an Alexa developer. I’ve never touched the Amazon Developer Console before. I just described what I wanted and followed the steps.

There’s a version where this annoyance just stayed. Cats competing at feeders, me telling myself I’d figure it out someday. Instead, that gap between “I wish this worked differently” and “it works differently” is now basically zero.

That’s what custom personal software feels like in 2026. You don’t need to be a developer to fix the small broken things in your life. You just need to be willing to describe the problem clearly.