Daily reminders, with the restraint to keep them switched on

[BleakMidwinter90]

Push notifications came out of the research as the most requested feature in every chore app — and they are also the fastest way for one to get permanently muted. So the rules matter considerably more than the plumbing, and they live in lib/domain/reminders as pure functions with 12 tests.

The rules

Four gates, all of which must pass:

1. The person asked to be reminded.
2. They have something to be reminded about. Nobody wants a notification congratulating them on an empty list.
3. Their chosen hour has arrived.
4. They have not already been reminded today.

That fourth gate is load-bearing well beyond politeness. Because the decision is idempotent per day, the dispatcher is safe to call as often as you like — which is exactly what lets a self-hosted instance run a plain fifteen-minute timer instead of requiring a cron daemon. Telling someone running a container on a NAS to "also set up a cron job" is the point at which they stop. There's a test asserting that property directly.

The wording

States the fact and stops. No exclamation marks, no "Don't forget!", no counting how many days something has slipped.

There is a test asserting the message never contains lazy, should, overdue, late, or behind. The rest of the app is careful never to become ammunition in a domestic argument; a notification is the single easiest place in a product to break that promise, so it's guarded explicitly.

Zero-setup keys

VAPID keys are generated on first use and stored beside the data. Asking a self-hoster to run web-push generate-vapid-keys and paste two base64 strings into a compose file before notifications work at all is another place people give up. Environment variables still win when set.

Key creation uses onConflictDoNothing and then re-reads, so two requests racing on a cold instance can't end up with keys that disagree with what a browser was just handed.

Details that matter

• The reminder stamp is written before sending, not after. If delivery throws, a missed reminder is a far smaller failure than notifying someone repeatedly on every subsequent tick.
• Dead subscriptions are pruned on 404/410 only. A timeout or a 502 from a push service is transient and must not cost someone their subscription.
• Reminder time is per member. One person is up at six; another would rather not be spoken to until the evening.
• Changing your time clears the stamp, so a new setting can take effect today rather than silently waiting until tomorrow.
• Permission is requested only on a button press, never on page load. An unprompted permission dialog is the fastest route to a permanent denial that the page can never undo.

Capability detection runs through useSyncExternalStore rather than an effect, so hydration stays quiet. The plain-HTTP case — a first-class deployment here — is explained in plain language rather than failing silently.

Verified

Against the running server: 401 unauthenticated, a valid 87-character P-256 public key that stays stable across calls (proving it's persisted rather than regenerated per request), 400 on a malformed subscription, and a cron pass that considered 10 members and correctly sent nothing.

131 tests, lint and typecheck clean, build passes.

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