Earlier this fall, I decided to try my hand at vibe coding, the slightly embarrassing name for describing what you want to an AI agent and prompting it to write code. I had been watching colleagues (specifically my technophile boss Dr. Joseph Cafazzo) ship working apps in days, and I was low-key jealous. Beneath the jealousy was a question I have avoided since becoming Director of the Centre, which is whether the distance between me and the people on my team who build software is real or whether I had simply never tried to close it. So I set out to build an app end to end with Claude as my only developer. I told no one about my little experiment. It felt like being a student again in my very own lab, staying up too late squinting at my laptop in the dark, and then at my phone once I had crept into bed, writing just one more prompt while my daughter slept soundly next to me.
The app is called Rounds, a circle of care for youth living with chronic pain. The idea came from the Chronic Pain Clinic at SickKids, where my mentor Dr. Jennifer Stinson works as a pediatric nurse scientist. A child there is seen by an anesthesiologist, a nurse, a psychologist, and a physiotherapist, and then the team sits down together to agree on a plan of care, because the best decision for a child comes from differing opinions and skill sets meeting in the same room. Most young people living with pain wait years for that kind of care, and I wanted to give them a version of it that lived right on their phones. Circle of care led me to round (bonus points if you know the banger The Windmills of Your Mind), which became rounds, a nod to the morning ritual of care teams gathering to talk through a patient’s case and deciding together what comes next.
In Rounds, a team of AI agents talks with you in one conversation and with each other in a side chat that you can read. Each agent brings a different clinical lens and a personality of their own, and before every conversation they read your recent check-ins so they know how your pain has been shaping your days. When you ask them something, they confer before anyone answers. The agent thinking like a physiotherapist might push for more movement while the one with a psychologist’s perspective worries you are already stretched thin, and you can watch them debate and finally agree on a plan. The side chat is my favourite part. I am weirdly fascinated by how AI thinks, and I love watching Claude think out loud before it answers me. I also watch loads of legal documentaries and always wish I could be in the room where the jury deliberates. The side chat lets me lurk inside the black box of how AI moves from disagreement to decision.
I did not write a line of code. Claude did that while I barked out orders through thousands of prompts, which turned out to be infuriating, satisfying, and hugely addicting. What started as one AI agent turned into a chaos loop of 30 agents across ten clinical disciplines. Beyond giving sound clinical advice, I wanted them to be incredible orators, so I had them study the legends: Oprah, Brené Brown, Michelle Obama, and of course Cardi B. Seven weeks and nearly 200 releases later, nurses at the SickKids Chronic Pain Clinic are testing Rounds, and we are planning a study to launch it in the very clinic that inspired it. Some might say it’s a full circle moment.
