Frustration often breeds innovation. After years of wrestling with project management tools that never quite fit my needs, I reached my breaking po...
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You got my interest, but I see no URL for things. Are you selling this product? Is it open source? Etc. My interest is there, but I have no clue as to what next steps are there.
Oh hai!
No, I am not selling this. And I guess the code needs a bit more checking before I could OS it. I am more in a experimentation phase and I do not want to go down the typical buzz/audience/product route for an itch that probably only I have to scratch.
If you want to take one thing away: a wiki in your codebase and a 'agentic LLM' is a good thing for backlog work. Another thing would be building on google sheets/docs and gemini. but I havent tried that.
Wow what a tease. Release the tool! (When it's ready)
My workflow is similar and I've had a lot of the same thoughts. Also, I'm working on a bunch of components that didn't exist to help me manage my workflow at large. It's a great idea and I'd be interested in contributing and getting it production grade. He l hit me up if you'd like some help or feedback. And it doesn't need to be fully working or great code, lol.
Oh, that's new.
In all seriousness, this is really cool and I would personally love to see the code.
I'm building a IA project management with kanban, redbox and so.
Wait for "keazy.io" for the end of the year
I'm wondering if there is no tool or a set of tools that allow you to achieve the same result.
There are tools that support markdown. There are tools where you can add custom fields and create views based on those fields. There are tools that have an API to feed data to the workflow.
And even if a tool doesn't have the feature you want, isn't it possible to simulate the wanted workflow some other way?
Maybe you all are a bit to entangled in this ycombinator, marc anreesen startup pivot BS thingie. I am buildign this to build things right and not to use my time to tame anything that is not 100 suitable for my case. I am building this for the sake of building it, so honestly: I really do not care about anything else that is around that 'might do 90%' of the job.
I applaud you for building your own tool. I was just curious about the why. I gave a few examples of things existing tools have solved, that you mentioned in the post that were breaking points for you.
To me it seems that the frustration is brought on out of lack of research. I don't believe there is no project management tool that isn't extendible enough to fit your needs.
I did my tour around tools. No need for me to do more testing to end up paying another 20 bucks a month to enter tickets into someone elses dream of what UX is. I am more keen to build this thing multiple times (it is my 2nd approach in the last 24 months to do so) and learn from it. I am aware, that decisions made in anger rarely lead to good outcomes.
sorry for the ui, but this is a feature I am missing in many tools or that I have to expensively add on.
The next feature is a report, that just outlines the changes in a specific timeframe. This way I could document the changes in a iteration or the changes in a estimation session.
I applaud you for taking the stand you did. I have also went through the same anger/build my own experience and decided to build my own web application server and frontend framework.
To many this might seem a waste of time but to those who understand, this is the way you have to go if you want to achieve real productivity. This is why you see as companies start to grow in size, that they start to build their own internal tools and products to meet THEIR needs. How do you think we got, react, angularjs. How do you think we got things like graph databases, document databases, etc. because sometimes the status quo doesn't cut it when we are trying to move faster or innovate.
I too would be interested in seeing your product in action like many have commented, but I also appreciate that this post was probably just a rant and hope you continue to reap the benefits from what you have developed.
When the status quo becomes disruptive, disrupt the status quo.
i think I will speak about the data model in a follow up post. I do think I could profit from some feedback.
Great idea and I'm looking forward to seeing the implementation in action.
Here's the idea, and I hope it's not too complex to implement. It would bring so much flexibility to the product that I think everyone might want to use it. Still, the implementation wouldn't take too much time.
You might have any parameter added to the story (like config, perhaps) as a numeric or string and then used in the story. This way, you wouldn't be limited to effort, risk, etc.
This way, you would have unlimited possibilities of your story, including using story points for people who like it.
there is a back and forth about this in my experiments: i have tried less formal .... nosql e.g. .... but if I show you my pgsql layout that can do weighted estimates in one query ( a large one) ...... then maybe you can understand, why I am going with more formal here.
Going down the rabbit hole makes it a requirement to do these for any past state of the backlog (to make things comparable).
This is what I am experimentong on now. The reason is the chaos that ensues, then I build this complexity into the database AND the code consuming this. The time from 'elegant' to 'dude where is my bug?' is super short.
But you are right, maybe someone else want another way to 'estimate', but I can happily ignore all that ... just writing what I build for myself.
Looks cool! Vibe coded?
parts. I re-did the core without it mutiple times to see what works better and use this core for more vibecoding.
Same story frustrated finally build one mvp Play Flow. You just need to Create a team then Create Project provide target timeline assign team and boom your project is created. The real magic is when you add your tasks you define the difficulty and priority progress % will automatically calculated the time is assigned. If someone interested ping
Curious if you considered building on Obsidian which has several Plugins that are close? Then customizing for your needs.
No. Obsidian is not something I checked. It would make sense though. But a bit much again to bully around a bunch of markdownfiles.
and then: this is maybe a little exercise in finding out how things like obsidian are built.
What obsidian is missing - if I remember correctly: state machines/workflows.
Tbh: I don't want any 'if, then, else' logic if I can avoid it and cram all that in a small but funky kind of workflow engine.
I'd like to bind 'agent integration' to workflows (those doing the tool calling), so I can have a little more easy control over what is happening when there are machine made changes.
This post hits hard — finally, someone writing things that aren’t just regurgitated docs. 😄
Speaking of pushing boundaries, I’ve officially published a blog where I drop something kinda massive:
I’ve created an AGI blueprint — not a theory, not a doodle, a real architectural breakdown I call AGI Showdowner.
It’s meant to challenge the hype, question the flaws, and maybe (just maybe) set the tone for how AGI could be built without it becoming Skynet's annoying cousin.
Would love to hear your thoughts (or criticism, I’m immune at this point).
🔗 Read the AGI Showdowner here
I like it your metrics: Value, Penalty, Effort, Risk also very important idea is the feedback loop handling.
Great idea. Working on personal project is always interest, gives insights intonproduct & project mgmt in ways that we haven't seen during professional structure. I can help you testing the app. Let me know just in case. Can be reached out at [email protected]
honestly, respect, i love seeing someone just make their own thing outta sheer frustration - gotta ask though, you think most people would actually be better off building their own tools instead of settling for stuff that almost fits?
I dont know, in the age of LLM agents, I am keen to try.
Great post. It sounds like you learned a lot and gained so much from this project. Thanks for sharing.
Your story is so relatable. I have felt the same frustrations with project management tools. Love your approach to estimation and connecting everything through Markdown. Thanks for sharing!
Hmm... Interesting!
I see no URL or GitHub link, bow even what the app is called.
😁😁
Love how you made everything revolve around markdown and real metrics. How are you thinking about integrating AI agents next?
Story Splitting, Estimation, Backlog Grooming and automatic creation of ADRS
Interesting!! Any thoughts to collab and build this huge together?
There was someone on the thread with a own ideas asking for collab. So ping him I guess.
It'd be great to know if this tool could publish to the gemini protocol for people to view via clients like Lagrange/Ariane/etc, or with the Firefox extension "geminize"
the idea is much alike. but my inner implementation is quite different. But there are related ideas.
I am on something similar making my very own productivity software, to make my whole process easy. I wish for you success.
Same here Amazon was not opening account for selling books then created own website and trying to build better technology.
what did you build better than amazon?
So good
I came to a similar conclusion a month ago and have been wanting almost the same things. I'd be interested in helping if you are open to it.
Resonates hard.....love the balance of simplicity and real metrics here...