Twenty-Five Years Later, I Finally Shipped

Twenty-Five Years Later, I Finally Shipped It

Twenty-five years ago, I was in school learning to program. My final thesis project was an astrology app. You'd enter your birth date, your time of birth, your place, and it would generate your full astrology birth chart. I worked on it for eighteen months.

When I finished school, I had it on CDs. Ready to put out into the world. The CDs got corrupted. Every one of them. And that was it. The app just never happened, and I've thought about that project more times than I can count.

Fast forward, Claude Code launches and since I am consulting about it regularly I wanted to get some hands on experience. The first thing that came to mind was obvious: build the app I never got to release.

I've been studying Vedic astrology for twenty years, and use it as a framework. It's been one of the more useful lenses I've found for understanding patterns in my own life, and I've taken it seriously. Five thousand years of documented practice tends to earn that kind of respect.

What Vedic Astrology Actually Is

Most people's exposure to astrology is the Western kind. You know your Sun sign. Maybe you know your Moon sign. You've read a horoscope. Vedic astrology, also called Jyotish, is a different tradition entirely. It's older, more mathematically demanding, and it maps the sky differently.

The system originated in ancient India more than five thousand years ago, not as fortune-telling, but as a framework for understanding patterns: a person's tendencies, their timing, the deeper shape of events they're likely to encounter. It was one of the essential supporting disciplines of the Vedic tradition, originally used to determine timing for ceremonies, agricultural decisions, and important choices.

Over centuries, a group of serious scholars built out the full technical system, with mathematical rigor that stands on its own. The nakshatra system, which divides the sky into twenty-seven sections based on the Moon's path, is one of the oldest star-mapping systems ever developed, predating the Western zodiac by centuries.

The tradition has been passed down without interruption since then. University programs in India offer degrees in Jyotish. Families with multi-generational astrology traditions continue to practice. For more on the history and core concepts, the My Omen site has a full breakdown https://myomen.app/what-is-jyotish

Vedic vs. Western: They're Not the Same System

If you've looked into Vedic astrology before and noticed your signs are different from your Western chart, that's not an error. The two systems use different reference points.

Western astrology uses a tropical zodiac, anchored to the vernal equinox. Vedic astrology uses a sidereal zodiac, anchored to the actual fixed star background. Over the past two thousand years, the slow wobble of Earth's axis has moved those two reference points about twenty-four degrees apart. Vedic astrology applies a correction called the Lahiri ayanamsha to account for this. Your Vedic Sun sign is usually one sign earlier than your Western sign as a result.

The house system is different too. Vedic astrology uses whole-sign houses, where whichever sign was rising at birth becomes your entire first house, and each subsequent sign is a complete house. It's the oldest documented house system in any astrological tradition and produces consistent results across all birth latitudes. Western astrology has multiple competing house systems, with Placidus being the most common, and practitioners genuinely disagree on which is correct.

Then there's timing. Vedic astrology has the Vimshottari dasha system: a 120-year cycle of planetary periods calculated from the Moon's exact nakshatra position at birth, with sub-periods of all nine planets cycling within each major period. Western astrology has no structural equivalent. My Omen is built on the Vedic system, not a blend of the two. If you want the full breakdown on the following link which walks through each difference point by point. https://myomen.app/vedic-vs-western

Why AI Makes This Possible

Here's what I didn't have twenty-five years ago, and what makes this version actually work better than it ever would have.

Vedic astrology is one of the most calculation-heavy interpretive systems that exists. A traditional astrologer doing a full reading from scratch could spend a week on the math alone before they wrote a single word of interpretation. Planetary positions to the arcsecond, ayanamsha correction, nakshatra placement, dasha period and sub-period timing, house calculations, planetary dignity, aspect relationships, all of it stacked together and interdependent.

My Omen runs Swiss Ephemeris calculations to the arcsecond, uses Lahiri ayanamsha, and uses whole-sign houses throughout. That's the same tool professional astrologers use. The math that used to take a week takes a millisecond. And that precision gets handed to Soma, the AI built into the app, which can actually have a conversation with you about what it means.

You could theoretically have gotten software to calculate a chart in the late 1990s. What you couldn't get was something that could explain it to you in plain language, answer your follow-up questions, or talk through what a particular dasha period means for where you are right now. That's what AI adds, not just speed, but access to a real conversation about what the chart says. More on why AI specifically matters for this kind of system here. https://myomen.app/why-ai-helps

Three Modes, Because Vedic Astrology Can Get Technical

Vedic astrology comes with its own vocabulary. Sanskrit terms like Lagna, Rashi, Vimshottari, Nakshatra, Ketu. If you're new to it, that can feel like a wall.

My Omen has three reading modes. The astrology doesn't change between them, only the language does.

Scholar is for people who want the full technical language. The Sanskrit terms, the classical framework, the precision vocabulary that experienced practitioners use.

Standard is the default. Clear, specific, readable without needing a background in the tradition.

Gen Z is exactly what it sounds like. The same chart, the same reading, different register entirely. Depending on the day you're having, sometimes that's what you need.

Free Forever Plan

The free plan gives you your full Vedic birth chart, a daily Moon-sign reading, and three monthly sessions with Soma AI. That's a real chart, not a teaser. If you just want to see your chart and understand the basics, you don't need to pay anything.

Free — $0, forever

• Full Vedic birth chart

• Daily Moon-sign reading

• 3 Soma AI sessions

• All three reading modes

  
  

Monthly — $9.99/month

• Everything in Free

• Full Year Report with monthly outlook

• Career, Love, Money, Health, Family breakdowns

• 50 Soma AI sessions per month

  
  

Yearly — $79/year

• Everything in Monthly

• 100 Soma AI sessions per month

  
  

Soma AI top-up — $5 for 50 sessions

• Valid up to a year

• Works on any plan

If you want to try premium, use the code VEDIC at sign-up and your first three months are FREE!

You can get start below at https://myomen.app