Outside research

Personal software

I design and build my own tools with coding agents, mostly for focus and attention. Each one is built for a single user and keeps private data under its owner's control.

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What I use every day

Focus · Mac app

Ratchet

An accountability timer that only turns one way.

Ratchet lives in the menu bar and asks every minute what I am doing and which goal it serves. Untracked time counts against the day, work cannot start without a goal, and each sitting ends with a yes or no on whether I did what I said. Goals nest into trees with deadlines and completion bonuses, and a 1000-point day score makes drift visible as soon as it starts. One Cloudflare Durable Object holds the state, so the Mac app, a phone PWA, and a public dashboard stay in sync.

Python · PyObjC · TypeScript · Cloudflare Durable Objects

See Ratchet's page →

Design principles

How they are built

Make the bad path impossible, not merely costly

Ratchet will not let work start without a goal, because a design that relies on willpower fails on the days it is needed most.

Local first and private by default

Personal data stays under its owner's control, and any model call over untrusted input goes through a locked-down CLI with no tool access.

Built for one user

There is no onboarding and there are no settings nobody uses. Each tool fits one person's habits exactly, which keeps each one small.

Agents write the code, I own the specification

Coding agents produce the implementation. My work is the specification, the corrections, and the decisions about what to throw away.