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Comment by rheisen_ | Hacker News Reader

I left my job as a principal software engineer a few months back and have been working on an agentic harness and https://blackbear.app -- a local first, end-to-end encrypted everything app with file editors for notes, documents, sheets, free-hand canvases, slides, and a whole lot more. Also features a calendar and task system, and a lightweight discovery engine. There's a BYOK agent system (Pax) that works with you across the whole app (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and local Ollama support). Works in a browser, from the CLI, and from native mac and linux apps (mobile on the way). Not exactly sure my end goal yet, but it's been fascinating building these things

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Oh, and all the editors support real-time collaboration. There's messaging, voice and video calls, and a lightweight contact management system that I'm still iterating on

Hi. As you are deeply thinking about these sorts of things, I want to see what you think of my https://useorganizer.com which turns the todo idea on its head a bit by being timeline oriented.

Seems very cool! I like the concept. I am still designing a "project" sort of organization primitive myself, which would incorporate more time based views of progress.

Just from browsing around and playing with it a bit, it seems there's still a lot of polish needing to be done. Quite a few areas where data is leaking across UI boundaries and some of the hard problems like data management and retention are stubbed (export is nice but it's the floor imo)

Thanks! And absolutely there is a big tidy up and code review on the horizon for this repo.

Data storage changed direction a few times as I heavily used this and found things that seemed fine in theory didn't work out in practice.

A big one was using syncthing and folder sharing in the browser had all sorts of issues for this app and how it operates.

I'll probably add a sign soon to say this is alpha (as in before beta, a prototype) software.

It is vibe coded and is also an experiment is using AI more wildly than I would at work

Thanks for wording that kindly and thoughtfully. Some may have said it is trash and moved on :)

What is pax?

Pax is just what I call the agent inside of Blackbear. It's a model agnostic harness, e.g. you can use Claude (Fable, Opus, Sonnet, Haiku), GPT 5.6, or Qwen to provide the inference.

The harness gives the model a set of tools and guidance for working within Blackbear, so Pax regardless of the model you supply can help you write notes, manage a spreadsheet, organize your space, etc.

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