Personal
One user. No multi-tenancy, no plugin API, no settings pages. The platform supplies sign-in, data, and navigation; everything else is a system I edit directly.
A personal operating system
Software for one life.
Polaris is where I build my own productivity systems — each one shaped to exactly how I work, in code I can rewrite the day that stops being true.
Today
Sunday, November 1 — 2 entries today, ₱1,284.50 spent this month, 3 of 4 habits ticked today.
Journal2 entriestoday
Expenses₱1,284.50November so far
Habits3 of 4ticked today
The exercise
Build the tool instead of bending to one
Productivity apps are built for everyone, so they fit no one exactly. You adapt your routine to their data model, ignore most of their features, and keep a spreadsheet on the side for the one thing they can't do.
AI-assisted development changes that trade-off. When software is cheap to write and cheap to rewrite, it's reasonable to build a system for each part of life that needs one — sized to the actual problem — and to rebuild it when the problem changes. Polaris is that exercise, run on one person: me.
Continuously improving
Every system tracks whether it's working — metrics it records on its own, reflections I write, and a history of what changed and why.
Where I need it
Web-first, built for the phone too. The expense tracker is designed to be used one-handed in a store aisle.
Systems
What's built so far
Each system is a self-contained module with its own data, interface, and logic. They share a platform, not code.
Engineering journal
A daily micro-log of what I'm building, learning, and working on.
- Short, timestamped entries filed under topics
- Inline #tags and [[topic]] links
- Markdown editor with checklists
- Full-text search across every entry
Activity expenses
What an outing costs, captured while it happens. It replaced a two-column Google Sheet.
- One tap to start a grocery run or a night out
- Phone-first capture with a running total
- Items save instantly and sync through dead zones
- Monthly trends by activity type
Habit tracker
A weekly tracker where each day is off, partial, or complete.
- Partial days still keep a streak alive
- Consistency trend, streaks, and heatmaps
- Every habit keeps its own journal topic
- Logs show up as diamonds under the day
Architecture
How the pieces connect
Systems don't import each other. Each one registers with the platform through a manifest, and the platform handles everything that cuts across them. There is one deliberate exception.
Activity expenses
Engineering journal
Habit tracker
Platform
- Sign-in
- Data
- Command palette
- Today dashboard
- Feedback
- Habits and journal
- The one direct tie between systems. Creating a habit creates a journal topic with the same name, and renames and archives stay in step. A log written from the tracker is a journal entry in that topic — and it comes back as a diamond under the day it was written.
- Command palette
- Each manifest declares searchable layers. ⌘K jumps to any system, drills from a topic down to a single note, or searches every system at once.
- Today dashboard
- Each system registers a card and a one-line summary. The dashboard stitches them into a single sentence, so the day starts from one view instead of three.
- Feedback loop
- Systems record metrics as a side effect of use — entries written, items per activity, what each outing cost. Reflections and an iteration history sit beside them, so each rebuild starts from evidence.
Adding a system
A new system starts as a copy of systems/_template. Its manifest is the whole contract — listing it in systems/index.ts puts it in the sidebar and the command palette. No plugin API, no config file.
export const manifest: SystemManifest = {
name: "expenses",
displayName: "Activity Expenses",
description: "Track what an activity costs while it happens",
nav: {
label: "Expenses",
icon: "receipt",
href: "/expenses",
},
palette: {
layers: [palette.activitiesLayer],
},
};Under the hood
Built to be rebuilt
The tech stack is chosen for low-friction rewrites. The backend is moving from Postgres to Convex one system at a time — expenses first, then journal and habits — with an Expo app to follow.
- TypeScript
- Next.js 16
- React 19
- Convex
- Bun workspaces