Most oracle apps I tried felt like slot machines. You open them, you tap a button, the screen flashes, a card flips, a streak counter updates, and somewhere a server quietly notes that you have engaged. The experience is engineered to keep you tapping. The book underneath it is not the point. The point is the loop.
I wanted the opposite. I wanted a quiet companion to a very old book. So I built one.
The slot machine and the mirror
A slot machine wants you back. The pull is the product, and the prize is whatever keeps you pulling. The longer you stay, the better it does. You can dress this up with notifications and streaks and "personalised insights," but the underlying shape is the same: a feedback loop tuned to make leaving feel like loss.
The I Ching is not built that way. It is a book. You pick it up when you need it. You read one page slowly. You put it down. The reading is meant to settle into the rest of your day, not occupy the rest of your day. The book has been doing this for three thousand years and it has never once asked for a notification permission.
I wanted an app that respected that shape. No streaks. No daily-quest pop-ups. No "you have not opened the I Ching in 4 days" guilt push. One Birth Hexagram Triad you receive once and keep for life. One daily hexagram drawn from the same ancient cycle as everyone else, so there is nothing to rig. Space, between visits, for the reading to actually land.
A mirror. Not a slot machine.
Why classical I Ching
People sometimes ask why the I Ching specifically, since there are plenty of other oracle systems with prettier branding. The honest answer is that the I Ching is the one that has held up under three thousand years of scrutiny by people much smarter than me. Confucius wore out the leather bindings of his copy three times. Leibniz saw the binary numeral system inside the structure of the hexagrams. Jung wrote the foreword to the Wilhelm translation and treated synchronicity as a serious psychological phenomenon partly because of his time with the book. Whatever you think the I Ching is, it has earned its standing as a piece of human thought.
The other reason is structural. The I Ching is sixty-four discrete hexagrams, each made of six discrete lines, each line either yang or yin. The whole system is countable, lookupable, and deterministic in the only ways that matter. You can build a calculation engine on top of it that gives the same answer every time the inputs are the same, and that engine corresponds to a real mathematical structure in the text. Tarot decks vary by deck and by reader. Runes and other oracle systems do not have the same level of internal scaffolding. The I Ching does, and that scaffolding is what makes a calm, deterministic app possible.
If you want a longer, gentler introduction, What is the I Ching is the primer I wrote for people coming to the book for the first time.
My way to the I Ching
I came in sideways. For years I had been searching, chakras, astrology, the Tree of Life, every framework that promised a way to read a life as a pattern. The I Ching was always there, acknowledged. I just never opened it directly.
What finally pulled me to the book was Human Design, a synthesis system that places the I Ching's 64 hexagrams at its core. Every "gate" in a Human Design chart is one of the 64 hexagrams, with a specific changing line. I had been reading those hexagrams for years through that lens before I went looking for the source.
By the time I met my partner, Zoe, I had been chasing the book through Human Design for a while. She, it turned out, had been studying it the direct way the whole time, slow, line-by-line, with the translations themselves. Two routes to the same book.
That overlap is what finally turned years of private practice into a project. We decided to build it together. I write the code. Zoe and I shape the design and the voice. The bar we hold each other to is poetic, accurate, and yours to keep.
The year of failed prototypes
Before HexWave became HexWave, it was a folder of prototypes. There was a version that tried to be a daily-habit app. The reading was at the top of the screen, the streak counter was on the home screen, and the experience felt like every other oracle app on the store. We threw it out.
There was a version where the AI prose was syrupy and inflated. Every line of every hexagram came back with twelve adjectives and not one noun. We threw out the prompt and rewrote it from scratch with a much shorter system message and a much stricter voice contract. That helped.
There was a version where the reading was longer than a page. It scrolled. It had subheadings. It had sidebars. It also had no chance of being read all the way through, ever, by anyone in a hurry. We cut it down by two thirds and made the depth available behind a single tap, on demand, only when wanted.
There was a version that tried to do mutual readings as a percentage score, like a compatibility test. We hated it the moment we saw it on screen. The I Ching does not do percentages. It describes. We rebuilt that surface around named tiers and structural notes and threw out the score.
Each time, the cut felt like progress. The shape we kept rediscovering was the simplest one: one page, written carefully, then space.
The Plum Blossom rabbit hole
The deterministic core of HexWave is the Plum Blossom Oracle, a method classically attributed to Shao Yong in the Northern Song dynasty. It maps a moment in time to a hexagram via simple modular arithmetic on the Chinese calendar: year branch position, month, day, and (when known) hour branch are summed in two halves to produce two trigrams; the sum of all four indicates which line is changing.
I will spare you the multi-page derivation. The point is that the formulas are short, the inputs are well-defined, and the output is reproducible to the line. Given the same birth date, the engine will produce the same Birth Hexagram Triad on my machine, on your machine, on a server in Hetzner, and in 2046 when this codebase is presumably someone else's problem.
That determinism is what makes a calm app possible. You receive your triad once. It does not change. You do not have to "draw again" to see if the universe is in a better mood today. The reading is yours, and it stays yours, and the app's job is to render it carefully and then get out of the way.
If you want to see the King Wen number you would land on for any given hexagram, the 64 hexagrams index is the place to browse.
What HexWave is, and what it is not
HexWave is a small independent project. One person writes the code. Two people shape the voice. There are no investors, no growth targets, no pivot risk, no advertising on the surface, no plans to "expand the platform." Premium pays for one person to keep translating the book, slowly, by hand, into something a beginner can actually use.
It is not trying to be a community. It is not trying to be a brand. It is not trying to be a daily habit. It is trying to be a good edition of a very old book on your phone. The bar is poetic, accurate, and yours to keep. If at any point we miss that bar, the right answer is to fix the reading, not to add a feature.
If any of this resonates, the About page is where the principles are written down so you can hold us to them.
A note in closing
I built the engine. Zoe gave me the wind to ship it. The book is ours together to read; the bar we hold the readings to is ours together to keep. If you find HexWave useful, tell a friend, gently, in person. If you find a reading that lands, sit with it for a day before you decide what it means. That is how the book has always been used, and that is the kind of app I wanted to build.
If you catch a bug, have some feedback, or just want to connect, write to us.
Yours,
Asaf