Working Memory

A board for what's on your mind — Today, Focus, Waiting, Backlog, Brain Dump — where every change is kept, so you can scrub back through the board's history and see it as it actually was. Live demo: workingmemory.onrender.com (no signup, a throwaway board seeded with a few weeks of history; the free tier takes about a minute to wake up).

The scrubber pulled back to a past moment — the board re-renders as it was, read-only.

The phone app: a Now feed you can tick through, and a card sheet for everything else.

What it does

• Five lists — Today, Focus, Waiting / Later, Backlog, Brain Dump — plus a pinned daily note. Columns can be renamed, added, reordered or removed.
• Recurring cards that reset each day or on a chosen weekday, with a streak count.
• Sub-cards at any depth, each with its own history; cards can also open into a whole board.
• Time travel over an append-only event log: drag the scrubber and the board re-renders at that moment. The ticks are the real moments something changed.
• A weekly review written from that history — what you finished, what moved, what has been parked in Waiting. It is generated by a script on your own machine; the server holds no API key.
• A phone app with one-tap completion, bottom sheets for card details, capture, search and time travel, and Web Push once it is installed to the Home Screen.
• Light and dark, following the system theme until you pick one.
• Shared boards: invite another account by username; each side sees the other's changes within about a second.

How it's built

• Next.js 14 (App Router), React 18, TypeScript — server components and server actions, no separate API layer for the app itself.
• SQLite via better-sqlite3. Triggers on items append to item_events, so every change is journaled at the database layer rather than by app code, and time travel is a replay of that log. See ai/ARCHITECTURE.md.
• Litestream to Backblaze B2 — continuous replication with restore-on-boot, so the host needs no persistent disk and every deploy doubles as a restore drill.
• Render's free tier, built from the Dockerfile per render.yaml; sessions are stateless HMAC cookies, so there is no session store to keep.
• The phone app is its own shell under components/phone — same data and same server actions as the desktop board, no shared layout. Tests are plain node suites run by npm test.

Run it

npm install
npm run dev        # http://localhost:3000, data in ./data/wm.db
npm run dev:demo   # the hosted demo experience: a throwaway board per visitor
npm run build
npm test

Local use needs no configuration. Everything else is optional and documented in .env.local.example: DATA_DIR, DEMO_MODE, OWNER_SECRET, BRAIN_TOKEN, WM_OWNER_BOARD_ID, OWNER_USERNAME, VAPID_PUBLIC_KEY, VAPID_PRIVATE_KEY, VAPID_SUBJECT.

Three endpoints exist for a companion app on my own machine, all behind the same BRAIN_TOKEN bearer (unset it and they 404). GET /api/context returns the open cards on the owner's board as compact triage context. POST /api/items creates one card through the normal write path, so the triggers journal it like any other write. POST /api/push/send delivers a Web Push notification to the owner's subscribed devices.

Design

The phone app's design is written down in two plans: ai/plans/2026-09-04-phone-app.md (screen map, the completion moment, touch rules, the iOS install checklist) and ai/plans/2026-09-04-phone-app-second-pass.md (the tightening pass, with the type ladder and the decisions behind it).

The palette is called Nocturne: a near-black ground, one amber accent for now and a blue for the past, elevation as a luminance step and a hairline rather than a shadow.

The phone idea is one row at every depth — a sub-card is the same row as a top-level card, same height, same check target, no indent and no smaller type.

Current state, backlog and the ops notes worth knowing live in ai/PROJECT_STATE.md.