If you’ve been following my journey on Dev.to, you know I’ve been building SheepCat: an open-source, local-AI task tracker designed to fix the cognitive overload and "Wall of Text" found in standard Agile tools.
The community response has been incredible, and hearing the feedback has been a massive motivator. But there was a glaring irony in the project up until now: I was building a tool to reduce cognitive friction, yet asking people to clone a repo, set up environments, and install dependencies just to test it out.
That setup tax is exactly the kind of barrier that drains executive function before you even start.
So, I fixed it.
I am super excited to announce that the first official, packaged release of SheepCat (v1.0.2) is live. It has a standard installer. You don’t need any technical know-how, IDEs, or command-line wrestling to use it—just download, install, and open it.
The Surprising Reality of the "Hourly Nudge"
One of the core features of SheepCat is an hourly check-in designed to combat "time blindness."
When I first designed it, I wanted to make sure it didn't feel like a nagging micromanager. The workflow is built to be completely frictionless: if you are in the zone and don't want to break your flow, you just hit "Cancel" and the prompt instantly disappears. No guilt, no mandatory data entry.
But here is the surprising part I've discovered while using it: because the barrier is so low, I actually find myself logging more detail than I ever did in standard enterprise tools.
When the hourly prompt pops up, it’s incredibly easy to just quickly brain-dump what I actually did: "Struggled with the database connection for 20 mins, eventually covered x, y, and z." It takes ten seconds. It captures all the micro-struggles and context I would normally forget by 5:00 PM. And because SheepCat uses local AI to read those hourly logs, those granular details are automatically woven into my end-of-day summary.
What is in the v1.0.2 Box?
Alongside the easy installer, this release packages up all the Quality of Life features we've been building:
The Gentle Todo List: A minimalist, visually quiet list to keep your short-term priorities in focus without the clutter.
Auto-Archiving: Completed tasks are automatically swept out of your active view into a markdown file so your screen stays clean.
Session Recovery: If you accidentally close the app, it remembers your session start time so your daily tracking doesn't break.
Total Privacy: All the AI summarization runs locally on your machine. Your work data never gets sent to the cloud.
Give it a try
If you are tired of standard task trackers draining your energy, I’d love for you to give SheepCat a try.
You can download the installer from the GitHub Releases page here: Link
Download it, run it during your next coding session, and let me know how the workflow feels for your brain!
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