What I Built

Sloth Desk is a one-page tool for the messages you keep putting off. Paste an email, a college notice, a landlord's text or a bill, and it gives you a short checklist: what it is, what you have to do, and every date, time, amount, file requirement and place, in order.

A real example: a 10-line placement-cell notice becomes five lines. Upload the resume as a PDF under 2 MB by 29 Oct, 5 pm. Attend the Infosys talk on 2 Nov, 10:30 am, in the main auditorium, with your college ID. The eligibility list goes up on 31 Oct. Nobody has to read the whole thing twice.

It saves the "I'll read this later" effort, and the cost of missing a deadline buried in paragraph four. Anyone who gets long, wordy notices (students, tenants, freelancers, parents) gets to be a little lazier.

It runs entirely on your own computer. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Code

Karishma-Das / sloth-desk

Sloth Desk

Paste a message you don't want to deal with (an email, a college notice, a landlord's text, a bill) and get a short checklist of what you need to know and do, with every date, time, amount, file requirement and place.

Runs fully on your own computer with a local open-weight model (Gemma 3 4B via Ollama). Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

How to run

Install Ollama and pull the model
```
ollama pull gemma3:4b
```
Download index.html from this repo.
In the folder with index.html, serve it (do not double-click it, browsers block it from reaching Ollama):
```
python -m http.server 8000
```
Open http://localhost:8000/index.html, paste a message, click Decode it.

If the page says it can't reach Ollama, either use step 3 as written, or set OLLAMA_ORIGINS=* and restart Ollama.

How it works

Calls Ollama's /api/chat with strict JSON output and temperature 0.
A worked example in the…

View on GitHub

It is a single index.html file with no build step, no backend and no API keys.

How I Built It

Model: Gemma 3 4B (open weights), run locally through Ollama.

App: one HTML file that calls Ollama's /api/chat on localhost, asks for strict JSON, and renders the checklist. You can also drag a .txt file onto the box.

Making a small model reliable:

Temperature 0, so the same message gives the same answer.
A worked example inside the prompt, so the model copies the format and style.
Prompt rules that force every date, time, amount, size and place into the same sentence.
A self-check in code: after the model answers, the page scans the original message for dates, times, amounts, sizes and file formats and checks each one made it into the output. If something was dropped, it retries once, naming exactly what was missed. If it is still missing, the page shows a red "Check the original for: …" line instead of giving you silent half-information.

Honest limits: in my testing, Sloth Desk caught roughly 95% of the details in messages. The rest are occasional misses or odd wording, mostly places, items to bring, and contacts, which the code check can't verify. It sometimes adds a filler line (for example a "Contact" line when the message has none). A larger model would likely do better, and the model dropdown lets you try one. Always check the original for anything that matters.

GitHub Copilot: [add one or two sentences on how you used Copilot while building.]

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

The messages people avoid are the private ones: bills, school notices, landlord chats, legal letters. With a closed API, every one of them would leave your computer and need an API key and a bill. Because Gemma is open-weight and Ollama runs it locally, Sloth Desk works offline, costs nothing per message, and keeps the text on the machine it came from.

Open weights also let me change the model, rewrite the prompt freely and add my own verification layer. The dropdown picks up whatever models are installed, so anyone can run it with a model that fits their laptop.

DEV Community

Sloth Desk: Paste a Message You’re Avoiding, Get a Checklist (Local Gemma, No Cloud)

What I Built

Demo