I've bounced between note taking, task tracking apps forever without really been satisfied with one and adopting it outright; Notion, Craft Docs, Apple Notes, Obsidian have all fallen down on how my mind works. I wanted to build something with Cursor so this was a perfect opportunity.
The build
As most things these days, my workflow started in an AI interface. I provided Claude the context and an outline of the future outcomes I was looking to achieve and after some brainstorming back and forth, I was happy to move to development. On request Claude produced a PRD and a prompt to provide to my AI Coding platform of choice, which was Cursor.
I felt my old web design skills come back in to play as I built a full stack application, powered by Next.js and storage in Supabase. The core functionality allowed me to take notes (with live transcription), track tasks and set reminders. I didn't stop there as I integrated Claude to give this simple application some edge, the AI generates a daily brief on what needs my attention, it assists me in completing tasks (creating sub tasks, or providing recommendations on next steps), note taking (summaries and action items for tasks) and transcribed live meetings for me providing follow up questions and connecting the dots with past meeting notes. This last feature triggered another project which I developed for User Interview assistance for my team (Write-up coming soon!)
I did spiral down some rabbit holes by building out functionality for tracking team capacity, research opportunity signals and product area specific insights. I realised this wasn't the tool for that and scaled it back but the building phase helped me think through the problem and my own usage patterns cemented that it was missing the mark.
Reflection
I forgot how much I loved the craft of building something. I got a lot of energy from it. It reminded me of hand-coding CSS and building sites on PHP and MySQL — except now the bugs are stranger and the iteration is faster.