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Hi HN! I've been building Dayflow, a macOS app that automatically tracks what you're actually working on (not just which apps you have open).
Here's what it does:
- It creates a semantic timeline of your day;
- It does it by understanding the content on your screen (with local or cloud VLMs);
- This allows you to see exactly where your time went without any manual logging.
Traditional time trackers tell you "3 hours in Chrome" which is not very helpful. Dayflow actually understands if you're reading documentation, debugging code, or scrolling HN. Instead of "Chrome: 3 hours", you get "Reviewed PR comments: 45min", "Read HN thread about Rust: 20min", "Debugged auth flow: 1.5hr".
I was an early Rewind user but rarely used the retrieval feature. I built Dayflow because I saw other interesting uses for screen data. I find that it helps me stay on track while working - I check it every few hours and make sure I’m spending my time the way I intended - if I’m not, I try to course correct.
Here’s what you need to know about privacy:
- Run 100% locally using qwen2.5-vl-3b (~4GB model)
- No cloud uploads, no account
- Full source available under MIT license (https://github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayflow https://github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayflow)
- Optional: BYO Gemini API key for better quality (stored in Keychain, with free-tier workaround to prevent training on your data)
The tech stack is pretty simple, SwiftUI with a local sqlite DB. Uses native macOS apis for efficient screen captures. Since most people who run LLMs locally already have their tool of choice (Ollama, LLMStudio, etc.), I decided to not embed an LLM into Dayflow.
By far the biggest challenge was adapting from SOTA vision models like Gemini 2.5 Pro to small, local models. My constraints were that it had to take up <4GB of ram and have vision capabilities. I had to do a lot of evals to figure out that Qwen2.5VL-3B was the best balance of size and quality, but there was still a sizable tradeoff in quality that I had to accept. I also got creative with sampling rates and prompt chunking to deal with the 100x smaller context window. Processing a 15 minute segment takes ~32 local LLM calls vs 2 Gemini calls!
Here’s what I’m working on next:
Distillation: Using Gemini's high-quality outputs as training data to teach a local model the patterns it needs, hopefully closing the quality gap.
Custom dashboards where you can track answers to any question like "How long did I spend on HN?" or "Hours until my first deep work session of the day
I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially if you've struggled with productivity tracking or have ideas for what you'd want from a tool like this.
What kind of problem is this solving? Why would I install spyware on my machine? lmao
wait... isnt this pretty much what Microsoft was doing with Recall?
Recall (and Rewind) are similar in the sense that they both use screen data, but it's designed for retrieving specific things you saw, not semantically summarizing your time. My opinion is that they're completely different feature sets.
The backlash for Recall was not based on the feature set, it was because of the massive privacy and security concerns.
There really isn't a reason that the screen data, once you have it, can't be used for more than one thing. I would guess that there isn't a whole lot stopping Windows Recall from doing very similar things.
Is it possible to include wearables as a data sources?
i.e. apple watch for sleep, running, activity levels? it could really give a 360 view of your life
On one hand I'm super enthusiastic about your project.
This could help battle procrastination, organize your time in a long run, bill your clients more efficiently, etc. 20 years younger, hyper productive me would kill for such product.
But then I recall when I accidently suggested TimeRescue to my boss at one time, and suddenly he was skimming though everyones daily logs to see if they're spending 100% of their times in business facing apps.
When I first heard about "covid mouse mover devices" that faked activity for remote workers I thought it was a joke. Seriously.
But I'm afraid this is the dystopian future. Employers constantly looking at your screen and getting spreadsheets with your daily effort.
Overall, very disturbing product.
Yea, honestly I would hate if people used this to track _other_ people, especially bosses. I wanted to build something that gave people more agency to do more with their precious time, but there definitely is a fine line here.
This was my first thought too. The last generation of activity tracking, while still dystopian, was a little different at least in that it was mainly statistical. So action-wise, it might point managers at "potential problems," but doesn't make its way into a performance review (e.g. "your mouse only traveled 81.72 screen-miles this quarter, 2 standard deviations below the mean, while you also scored the lowest on number of keystrokes with vscode as the active window..."). If a manager really wanted to summarize exactly what was done they had to spend an almost equal amount of time to watch. To some degree, this alleviates that.
I haven't seen this mentioned, but I immediately thought this could be a great tool for folks with ADHD. The potential for seeing what kinds of things regularly trigger distraction (I know, everything, right?) and any patterns that exist (i.e. every time I make a git commit, I go check Hacker News and lose 15 minutes). As well as being able to review day that was captured automatically is huge. The best success I had with tracking what I did was when I used to use TimeRescue to ensure I had accurate record of hours for clients, but every attempt to use anything that requires manual entry fails very quickly (either too distracting everytime I use it, or I literally just forget to use it).
Going a step further, "real time" (given processing delay) to help stay on task when the focus has shifted to something unrelated (maybe allow the individual to define this or say yes/no to train the prompts as it goes).
Anyways, it looks great. I also liked the _idea_ of Windows Recall, so to see something like this that can be privacy first is really nice.
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One of my first ever bug reports, was a submission to a company that made legal software.
In particular, it was a document management system built as a plugin for MS Outlook. (ew)
Most users, had no issue. However for one user, a lawyer, in particular, she would open and close a bunch of documents (using the built in pdf viewer) and then the application would crash, taking outlook with it, often requiring a restart.
I went over to view the behavior, and she was some kind of robot. Unlike her peers, she had 12 documents open at once, and she could update and bill (in minimum 6 or 7 minute increments) 12 customers cases in 15 minutes. It was like meeting the Usain Bolt of law practitioners. My back of the napkin math is that she billed like 3-4 hours for every hour she was online.
Open Email
Load Attachment
Review Attachment
Reply to email
Assign Email thread to case number
Close attachment.
12 times in 15 minutes.
The bug was that, after loading ~6 pdfs, the application would back off and wait to deallocate the memory. It would then later, randomly decide to write to that memory when another pdf was loaded, and go kaput.
Just to replicate the issue, I had to close and reopen pdfs so quickly my hands hurt.
It took 3 revisions of the bug report to get the software company to accept it and resolve it. And even then I think the pdf limit just increased, before we submitted another report and had it resolved permanently.
On that note, the principal of another law firm I supported would require us to cleanse his personal laptop of porn themed golf games he had downloaded on a regular basis.
The impression I get is that, lawyers work but the work is just unevenly distributed.