dmayle

There are four lights, my friends

I suspect it was one of the content review bots. In my first Show HN post, I handwrote the comment, but using a bulleted list style suggested by an AI agent, and that got flagged. I reached out to the mods, and they told me to switch to prose, which passed muster.

Thank you. Most of the wording and voice had to be tweaked multiple times since I've started... sometimes a phrase that I started with would seem grating after a few tries, so I put a lot of work into it. I'm glad to hear that you liked it.

I actually made a similar comment about bring-your-own-tokens on a different post a number of months back, and the response I got was that it didn't make sense. I didn't realize until building something myself, but it turns out that different models behave very differently to prompts, it's not just a question of model capability. If I tried to allow people to integrate their own models, not only does the product become much more unreliable, but the whole premise, which is that you don't have to worry about it, is now gone.

That's neat, did you wire a voice model to your own backend, or do you use something off-the-shelf and seed the context and save the output?

Personally, I tend to dodge phone calls, but it's true that I use this mostly with voice. Rather than having something talk back to me, I'm using a gesture and talking to it.

How often are you taking that phone call?

Thank you. No, this is my first pricing strategy. I came to it two different ways:

1) Bottom-up: this is the price that is sustainable given that there is a model reading your task list every morning

2) Top-down: this is priced between simple todo lists that just manage your data, and more complex AI tools that do a lot more than tasks.

Does your freemium app feature AI? Does it convert well into paying customers?

Thank you for the answer.

It's not exactly what I was hoping to hear, but it's also why I don't have a free tier, and I'm not relying on promo codes. If people won't pay for it at all, I want to learn that quickly, rather than building up a large number of users on a free tier that I can't sustain. Even a small paying audience can make this maintainable.

Voice input is prominent in the app, but the gesture setup is manual for a web app. I'll try to make it clearer on the site, help users get it set up.

I take your point. It's not the first llm-assisted app I started writing, but it is the first one I'm launching, so I guess that counts.

I'm hoping the answer to that is the same reason I built it, which is that proper task management is actually hard work. I think we like to fool ourselves into believing that if we removed this friction or that friction, we would just start the habit of managing our tasks, and only then would we get stuff done.

This app is about getting off that track, and just doing things instead. You might use it differently, but I've built it so that I only barely use the app. It's almost like a note taker, I just say the things I need to do into it, and check my email in the morning.

Thanks. That's both encouraging, and sobering, at the same time.

I'd love to know more about how that played out, two questions actually: 1) did people not sign up, or did they sign up and leave? 2) for the ones who left, did they dislike the triage, or did they think it was great and just not want to pay for it?

Getting the answers to those would help me choose where to focus first.

I've used it every morning since June, with incredible delight in what it does for my days, so I'm still going to try to find users who find the same value that I do.

Thank you for the offer.

There are already a decently large number of todo apps that don't have AI. They compete on audience, and integrations, so it's hard to differentiate and hard to deliver value worth switching. This one doesn't just add an AI chat interface, it uses the strengths of a model, handling arbitrary input, and re-reads your list every single day without getting bored or overwhelmed.

It's a prompt to a model with a set of rules that were built up from my usage (and those of testers) from roughly the last four months. It takes into account a deadline, if you specified one, urgency if mentioned, the text of the task itself. It looks at the age of the task, and its activity, the project, and it gets the whole list every morning. The model chooses three, and the reasons behind those three. I know it works, because I've used it and tuned the rules. When it got it wrong, I fixed it, using evals to make sure the existing cases didn't break.

Yes, you can build something with ChatGPT if you have a $20 subscription, and I'm sure that there are people who have already done that.

If you go that route, you do need a place to store your list that your assistant can see. For this app, it is the one and only place your task list lives, with voice input, and the UI has been tailored over many iterations, to make the common use cases as simple and as obvious as possible.

Getting an email to work the way this one does will take trial and error, because this one's not a summary, it's intentional choices, with the rationale, and it's complemented by the UI to customize your day.

Handling the prompts, as they change, will take work, and if you're using scheduled prompts, you'll need a way to know whether your new prompt works. I keep an eval set because the prompt change you make today can fail in subtle ways when looking at a different set of tasks. I've seen this nearly every time I've made a prompt change.

Thank you. It's a fair criticism, and I'll take note.

For the landing page, that's good to know. I didn't catch that, and I need to fix it, though I could definitely use your help with some specifics, if you're willing. I linked straight to the trial page. Is your criticism about that page, specifically, or about the home page?

What came out here that did not come across over there? Not speaking to design elements, but what could have told you it does more?

Thank you, and I agree. I want this to do one thing, and do it very well.

As to simple? If I wanted to joke, I'd say that my codebase would disagree, but in reality I see this as somewhat of a knife's edge. On the one side, you have the actual usability, and I've fought over every inch of the UI flows to try and keep them streamlined, useful. But on the other side, there is actual utility, and there are custom shapes for tasks I haven't addressed yet like scheduled tasks (e.g. watering the garden), repeating but varied tasks (e.g. school homework), and I need to make them fit in with the kinds of tasks people already put on a task list, like going to appointments, or personal projects like learning a guitar, work projects where a document must be finished before a presentation.

But the question is one I actually want to hear, and the answer is a resounding yes. I told my testers, when prompted about ideas (calendar integration, rich formatting), that I would have to weigh the utility for my users against the cost in complexity and maintenance, and it puts a silly smile on my face as I think about doing that work.

I'll take the opportunity to ask back to you. What does best in this area mean to you? What else could I be doing?

This is the best use case, you share all 500 things, and we manage them.

We do some organization for you (project creation, or sorting into projects you've already created), and each morning we go over all the open items, using the information you shared, any deadlines, urgency, and if you're waiting on a certain date to start. Then we rank them, and send you the three that come up, with the why, so you can reason over just those three, and correct us if we got it wrong.

And as for aspirational tasks? I had a "clean my office, this week" task that popped up as the third on my list, when the other two were taking me multiple days to do (actual tasks, not projects, just lots of trial and error so they took days), and after ignoring the task for two days, the app asked me if it was really important, and it was right, so I rescheduled it for after launch.

This app is meant to help you get things done, but it can't make you do them. So if you procrastinate, all it can do is read that signal, and offer what help it can (alternatives, reprioritization).