Paste Drops
Everyone has typed the 1am message they'd regret by 9am. Paste Drops is an Mobile app that takes your angriest or silliest draft, runs it past Cyclops, a one-eyed mascot with strong opinions about your caps lock, and hands back a version you can actually send. Type it or say it out loud; either way, the send button stays safe.
How a cool-down works
Paste or dictate the message. Voice goes through OpenAI Whisper for transcription, then the text is sent to Google Gemini, which returns three things: a quip from Cyclops about the state of your draft ("Three exclamation marks? Calm down, mate."), a cooled rewrite that keeps your point but loses the liability, and the detected language, because it answers Finnish in Finnish, Chinese in Chinese (even shows it in Hanzi), and Spanish in Spanish. Gemini TTS then reads the result aloud in your choice of Irish, Australian, British, American or Scottish accent, compressed on the fly to MP3 for slow connections. A "disasters averted" counter keeps score, stored only on your device.
Personality as architecture
Cyclops is not a fixed script. Each response rolls one of six moods, from upbeat to mock-weary bartender, across three user-picked tones: Work-safe, Petty, and Talk Me Out. He greets you on app open with a fresh quip, newly generated three times a day by a scheduled Cloudflare Worker, validated for length and tone, voiced in five accents, and cached globally so a million app opens would cost the same as one.
Built to fail gracefully
Every external dependency has an understudy. Text cooling falls back from Gemini to OpenAI, so no single provider outage takes the core feature down. Speech runs a four-tier chain: Gemini 3.1 TTS, then Gemini 2.5 (a separate rate cap), then OpenAI, then Cloudflare's on-network MeloTTS. Offline, bundled quip pools keep Cyclops talking. Timeouts scale with text length, and a hard privacy rule holds throughout: messages are processed on paid, no-training API tiers and never stored on any server; only anonymous counters leave the device.
Workflow
Solo-built in fast iterations: designed, shipped and load-tested to a 50-plus closed testing group on Google Play, with 20+ over-the-air updates in the first days via EAS Update, applied silently when the app is backgrounded. Development paired Claude Code and the Antigravity IDE for agentic coding sessions, with the CLI toolchain (npm, npx, Wrangler) driving deploys to Cloudflare.
Stack
App: Expo (React Native), Reanimated, EAS Build and Update, Firebase Analytics
Backend: Cloudflare Workers, KV, R2, cron triggers, Wrangler
AI: Google Gemini (rewriting, quips, TTS), OpenAI (Whisper transcription, TTS and text fallback), MeloTTS
Tooling: Claude Code, Antigravity IDE, GitHub, npm/npx
Web: pastedrops.com (Workers-hosted site)
