DevBook

An always-on-top macOS widget for capturing daily work notes and rolling them up into sprint or monthly summaries — with an optional AI write-up and a cross-reference against your own git commits.

Built for standups, sprint retros, and monthly 1:1s: jot what you do as you do it, then generate a tidy summary for the period without trawling your memory.

Install

Download the latest DevBook-<version>.dmg from the Releases page, open it, and drag DevBook to Applications.

The app is not code-signed. On first launch macOS Gatekeeper will block it: right-click the app → Open → Open, or allow it under System Settings → Privacy & Security.

Use

Launch DevBook; a small frameless window floats above other apps. Drag it by the title bar onto a second screen and leave it there.

Notes tab

• Type a note and press Enter to save (Shift+Enter for a new line).
• Notes are stamped with the current time; set the Time field to log a different time.
• The Day field selects which day you are viewing or editing — change it to read or backfill past days.
• Hover a note to edit (✎) or delete (✕) it.

Notes are stored as plain Markdown, one file per day, in ~/Documents/work-notes/daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md.

Sprint tab

• Pick any date; the app derives the sprint window containing it from a configurable anchor date and length.
• Generate sprint summary collates that window's notes into ~/Documents/work-notes/summaries/.
• Summarise last 30 days does the same over a rolling month.
• AI-written summary prepends a themed prose summary (see AI below).
• Include git commits appends the commits you authored in the window and, if AI is on, has the model reconcile them against your notes — flagging work you did but did not jot down.
• Copy summary to clipboard copies the generated Markdown.

Git tab

Preview the commits you authored in the selected sprint window, grouped by repo.

Settings (⚙)

The cog opens settings for the active tab:

• Sprint: anchor date and sprint length.
• Git: the parent folder scanned one level deep for repos, and the commit author emails that identify your commits.

AI summaries

The AI option shells out to the Claude Code CLI (claude -p) using your existing subscription — no API key required. If the claude binary is not found or not logged in, summary generation falls back to a plain day-by-day collation and reports the error. AI is therefore optional.

Build from source

Requires Node.js and macOS.

npm install
npm start          # run in development
npm run pack       # unpacked .app in dist/ (fast, for testing)
npm run dist       # signed-or-unsigned DMG + zip in dist/

Optional shell helpers

Two fish functions give terminal capture without opening the widget; they write to the same daily files:

note "fixed the webhook retry bug"   # append a timestamped line to today
notes                                 # print today's notes
notes 2026-05-20                      # print a specific day

See shell/ for the function definitions.