How I Automated Away My Weekly Status Reports with Next.js and Llama 3.1 🐈

#webdev #opensource #productivity

Context

As a founding engineer, I was spending too much time explaining what I was doing instead of building features. My clients are non-technical, and status meetings were distracting for my deep work.

Instead of just complaining about the micromanagement, I built Fabric 🐈.

What it does

Fabric connects to your GitHub account (via Octokit) and uses Next.js, Groq, and Llama 3.1 to transform raw commits from any branch/date range into clean progress reports ready for your clients or managers.

Built for the security-paranoid:

It never touches your code, only commit metadata. All you need is a GitHub token with strict read permissions.
This is a self hosted tool, not a SaaS. I didn't want to deal with third party compliance or store your repository data.
Best suited for freelancers, indie consultants, and small teams (2-10 people) without a dedicated product manager.

Limitations:

It only supports GitHub at the moment (GitLab/BitBucket are on the roadmap).
The report quality depends heavily on your commit messages. It gives you a solid 90% starting point to tweak before sending.

I used to build these weekly summaries manually by hunting down commits and copying them into Notion and ChatGPT. Now, I just run Fabric and get the clean markdown.