Me and Habitica
I'll be honest: I'm not really that much of a Habitica user. I learned about it from my colleague. Signed up for an account, thought the gamification was cool, and that's it.
Used it a bit, then I had the most cliché thought a developer could have: I need to automate this. Let's be honest: nobody wants to manually push a button when they commit something at work, open a PR, or review somebody else's PR. Nobody.
Pitched the idea to my colleagues. They thought it was cool, but everyone's busy with work. There was no out-of-the-box solution yet.
Fine. I'll build it.
That's how this thing started. It wasn't called Octogriffin back then. It wasn't really called anything. We had some discussions about what it should and should not be, which got me pretty excited.
Started coding. This was shortly before agentic AI. Slowly but surely it was taking shape: a little webhook handler here, a bit of an OAuth redirect there, and voilà! It was working. Locally. On my machine. Ngrok helped.
Built more pages, more triggers, more everything. But then I realized: for this to work at work, we would need to install it on our client's GitHub organization account.
Defeat.
Not happening. Took the wind out of my sails.
It sat in this unfinished state for a while. Then Opus 4.8 came out and I realized I could get it working real quick. Wrote up some PRDs and specs, and let Opus have a go at it.
Was decent. Talked about it with my colleague again. We came up with the name: Octogriffin. Bought the domain, deployed everything. It was awesome.
Sat again for months, until the first users and Ko-fi supporters came in. Put the wind back in the sails. Felt good. Around that time Opus 5.5 came out.
Fine. I'll finish it.
Completed a new feature, overhauled the website, released it, wrote a LinkedIn post, now writing this. Life is great again.
If my horrible writing skills haven't convinced you to try it out, then I don't know what will. Check it out either way:
Habitica GitHub Integration: XP for Commits & PRs – Octogriffin
Octogriffin is a free, open-source Habitica GitHub integration. Earn XP and Gold in Habitica for your commits, pull requests, and code reviews, automatically.
octogriffin.com
Claude's complaints
Claude gave me some feedback on this post.
The readers never find out what it does.
Ugh. You create triggers like "When I commit in these repositories, score this task in Habitica." That's the simplest trigger. There's a lot more. Don't make me tell you what it does, just try it out.
There's only one link.
Right.
- GitHub repo: github.com/drazenbebic/octogriffin
- Installation guide: octogriffin.com/installation
- Sponsors page: octogriffin.com/sponsors
The AI part is your most interesting angle, and you skip past it.
Is it really? I used Opus 5.5 and made it redesign everything from scratch using the atomic design methodology. Told it I like purple and that we should use noise in gradients to make it look cool. Also used a lot of Matt Pocock's skills (Improve Codebase Architecture, for example). There. You're informed.
Closing the loop.
I'm currently working on GitHub organization support. It still doesn't do that, lol.
The DEV Content Playbook emphasizes that the best posts don't just broadcast information—they start a discussion.
So, uh... Have you ever done something like this? Let me know what you think, I guess?
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