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This is quite cool. Makes me philosophical: isn't it odd, that this is like an Excel template? Like a "domain model" template? In this case, presented nicely in a TUI that makes basic CRUD workflows work.

Most SaaS companies are just that: 1) Curated domain model (stored in their cloud db) 2) Some way for users do to almost raw CRUD on the tables 3) Curated high-level domain specific workflows that do n CRUD calls underneath

So many of these SaaS apps could have been a simple Excel / domain model template like Micasa.

But it seems like we haven't "cracked" the perfect UI on top of relational DBs.

Excel: Good: raw CRUD. Bad: too many degrees of freedom + the possibility to edit the domain model itself. That's too much for most users.

TUI: Good: raw CRUD with some guardrails, limited possibility to adjust the domain model / not by accident. Keyboard shortcuts, for professionals. Bad: inaccessible for non-tech end users + hard to build good UX for high-level domain specific workflows.

Full Web UI: Good: accessible for all. Great for high-level domain-specific workflows. Bad: looks and works different every time. Raw CRUD possible, but always a compromise with editable data grid libraries.

I've always stubbornly bemoaned how everyone seems to love to work in spreadsheets. Undeniably the world's power-tool.

I've never liked them, never learned to work with them, and instead spent 20 years learning to program and make my own db-backed crud interfaces.

Your points are spot on. But I'd like to defend a sliver of my stubbornness about it all; a product built for a specific use or domain exports the _education_ and information architecture of that domain. Sure it's all rows and columns in a db, and a spreadsheet is just that exposed to the user, but a "product" and its creator/company gets to design and prescribe a learning experience. And I think that's the magic and the value. That's what I'm holding onto!

There was once a time when tools like Microsoft Access and FileMaker Pro were common. These were a database and custom GUI designed using a drag and drop editor. I don't know whether these apps ever had network server capability or if they were always offline or why they died out. It was a bit before my time

FileMarker Pro had a dedicated server product (FileMaker Server) that you could use for multi-user access. Claris still sells it: https://www.claris.com/filemaker/

Microsoft Access was strictly file based. You could drop the .mdb/.accdb file on a SMB share and it would support basic concurrency via lock files. However, you could also swap out the internal database engine (Jet) with anything else via ODBC, so your Access database could connect to a remote Microsoft SQL Server instance - or even MySQL/Postgres.

Back in high school, I even wired up an Access database to give a graphical frontend to an accounting app running on an IBM AS/400 mainframe. ODBC made it easy, and Access itself didn't really care where the data lived.

How many names do you think they ruled out before they settled on "Filemaker"?

I know a dude who runs his business off of FileMaker and even does work for his customers building them FileMaker stuff. He loves it.

I should probably give it a shot.

[dead]

I’ve lived the Microsoft Access times. The downfall of those tools was the refusal to keep the interface simple. They kept layering on features and UI cruft until they became massive apps pretending to be databases

I wonder what the state of workflow engines is these days. Back in the (distant, distant) past, everything seemed to use Lotus Notes. Today, there are oodles of workflow engines of all shapes and sizes, but asides from domain-specific stuff like Salesforce, I hardly hear anyone mention them.

Salesforce is used well beyond its domain, unfortunately. A lot of BAs love the drag 'n drop design features.

I helped a legacy Lotus Notes application reincarnate once, and it was impressive how reasonably solid it's ability was to be offline-first, and mobile first, and how fewer sychronization/replication errors there were than I expected.

Lotus Notes was doing decentralized apps built with NoSQL databases before either of those things were cool. Mostly because "going online" was potentially quite an undertaking at the time.

Web UI's for power tools are generally not a good idea. A browser will always have limitations and not quite reach the level of e.g. a TUI. On the other hand, TUI's as you point out has some serious limitations on its own.

So the answer is native app - I think what the world need is a super fast native spreadsheet that is NOT Excel. Kinda like a combination of Excel, TUI, and MS Access in one. Fast like Numbers.app, not sluggish like Excel is.

I'd use that. But it needs to have a keyboard centric operation, and be faster and a very solid, near industrial design, no "the latest flavor of someone's Figma design". I'm having a tough time explaining this.

What do you guys think?

Good to see (although I was more than sure there are) people thinking about this same thing.

I’m using Google Sheets for house and cars. Columns that should be easily grouped are using data validation and yes - few times deep into the experiment (because I’m sometimes lazy and miss some data - so experiment is good name) I’ve changed domain a little by adding columns. It meant empty values for existing rows - that I couldn’t fill in most cases, because a lot of time passed.

Reading many comments here I think we will create multiple frameworks/standards like always and some tools will be missing things others have :(

Funny thing is sheets works good and with scripts I can (still for free in terms of money) send notifications to selected channels or do some automated actions (like check disks status or order something automatically)

Edit: sheets have sync across devices too. Single SQLite for this specific case, having less nerdy people at home is an disadvantage.

> A browser will always have limitations and not quite reach the level of e.g. a TUI

There's no reason you can't jam a TUI into a browser. Perhaps to the surprise of both kinds of user, but it's possible.

> I think what the world need is a super fast native spreadsheet that is NOT Excel.

> I'd use that. But it needs to have a keyboard centric operation

You should boot up an emulator and check out the OG: Lotus 1-2-3. Keyboard driven, extremely fast, all written in 16-bit assembler for the original IBM PC running at, what, 4MHz?

It's because of Lotus 1-2-3's use of F2 for "edit cell" that F2 is still "edit" or "rename" in most applications.

(you can then continue the tour with WordPerfect and Borland Turbo Pascal, if you like light blue)

Back at a job I had in ~2008 we built a library to convert an Excel spreadsheet into a fully functional web based configurator. I've talked about it here previously[1].

I have always thought that it was a missed opportunity that we'd never reused it nor turned it into any sort of SaaS. It seems to me like such an obvious and easy way to let your clients define their own business logic without having to maintain it yourself.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20793043

dBase was the gold standard for this back in the 80s, early 90s. Great tool. Both the "dev" part and how it could be made available to non developers. The freedom of spreadsheets when developing and the constraints of a TUI (or just UI in those days) for users.

Our ERP is dBase+SQL server with Harbour executables, until I don't move all the database to SQL server it will be like that

Maybe we need a new dBase.

Considering Cognite made a fortune in the oil and gas industry by basically allowing companies to toss them all their data, them automatically linking and contextualizing everything using a tunable knowledge graph and then giving access this domain model, I think you are onto something. A bit late to the party but yes, this party exists and LLM are useful there for once.

Amusingly most of this data then end up back into Excel or PowerBi but the unbundling and contextualizing itself is worth the price.

Semantic mapping was the answer all along. It just failed on the open web. The idea never died in the industrial world.

> Full Web UI: Good: accessible for all. Great for high-level domain-specific workflows. Bad: looks and works different every time. Raw CRUD possible, but always a compromise with editable data grid libraries.

I'm not a Notion booster, and I know there are many other solutions with similar tools/features.

But I'd argue that Notion databases are a very good balance of all of these things. It can be raw CRUD if you want it to be, but it's easy to create custom views that accomplish often exactly what you need.

Not exactly sure what you mean by "looks and works different every time" w.r.t. web apps.

In my experience this is a good example of where the UX details matter significantly. Yes, Airtable exists. But a Notion database row being its own first-class "Page" is a *massive* deal for me. (Again: I'm aware Notion is not the only thing)

> Not exactly sure what you mean by "looks and works different every time" w.r.t. web apps.

Not the parent but I take it to mean _across_ web-apps from various services the UI looks and works differently, vs every spreadsheet is a spreadsheet and works like a spreadsheet.

Someone has a sense of humor in the reviews section:

"I’ve been using the demo data for three weeks. I don’t own a house. — Aspiring Homeowner"

I didn't see that review in the 4 shown in that section until I refreshed the page... there are some good ones in there, including a Hacker News shoutout :D

While we're in the joke thread, I was expecting that "mi casa es su casa" was going to turn into "sudo fix my house" somewhere in the docs.

I guarantee that's an AI-written joke.

Did I miss the innovation in AI humor? I searched for AI written jokes and they all seem like Markhov chain output.

Does it make it less funny? Do you find yourself laughing, but then you get soured because although the chuckle that was made was genuine, it came about from something that was created by a computer, so we have to hate ourselves for chuckling. Is that how it works?

Now THAT was funny.

It is.

I think/hope the whole "home manager" category is going to take off soon.

On a cost basis, it no longer makes sense--practically--not to use visual/text/audio intelligence to manage such a large asset. We just don't have the user-friendly mass-market interfaces for it just yet.

It's possible to scan every manual, every insurance policy, ingest every local bylaw. It's possible to take a video of your home and transform it into a semantically segmented Gsplat of [nearly] everything you own. It's possible to do sensor fusion of all the outward facing cameras from your home. And obviously agents like OpenClaw can decide what to do with all of this (inventory, security, optimization, etc).

We've been building https://homechart.app for years (without GenAI...) and folks just don't realize that home managers exist as an app. They're too used to single purpose solutions, so they don't think to look for more comprehensive options.

There's also the inherit struggle of being everything for everyone with an app like this, and focusing on features 80% of your users want and leaving the other 20% niche features on the backlog upsets people, mostly the power users.

I checked out HomeChart, and boy howdy it feels like its doing way too much.

Thank you for ironically proving my point, I guess. The main value add here is everything is integrated into one app. I always wonder if folks said the same thing when Salesforce or SAP were created.

Anyways we document our reasoning here: https://homechart.app/docs/explanations/architecture/#separa...

I dont know what Salesforce or SAP was when it started, but Im guessing it grew to what it is today over years, not out of the gate.

Kindly -- I think this is a symptom of the larger issue, right?

You shouldn't need a document to help persuade the consumer (or the more technically inclined ones anyway). That magic should just be self evident. We don't need a document to understand why the iPhone was a hit, right?

Doesn't matter if you have the greatest app in the world. If it overwhelms the user on first use, it's simply not going to be used.

I agree at first glance it is overwhelming unfortunately.

> You shouldn't need a document to help persuade the consumer

For the most part we don't. They get it, they have the frustration with duplication, and they see the value of our pricing being the same or cheaper than one or two of the apps their paying for.

The harder part as I said in the original comment is no one is searching for a household data solution. It's not a thing that exists to people, and we don't advertise (mostly) as "a budgeting app" or "a to-do app", so the persuading if you want to call it that comes from catching these buyers and showing them that yea, we do that, and so much more.

People say that about Salesforce and SAP now…

It's just hard sell vs the free of just having a spreadsheet

I've been working on something like this the last few months specifically around service quote analysis (repairs, construction, hvac, auto, etc.) and it's really cool. I think LLM analysis is the way to go because the amount of complexity is absolutely staggering - just to start the difference in quality and information available on a quote is drastically different between vendors within the SAME vertical. Then to do actual do analysis on local laws, the details of your property (not just photos/videos, but zoning and lot details), vendor analysis, etc.

On top of it all, the most important thing to consider is intent -> An emergency plumbing visit is often very different than a proactive upgrade.

edit: spelling

This is in line with my thinking, can you say more about how intent changes how you would use a system like this?

I had a really complex negotiation for car repairs (goodwill warranty, balancing a long list of repairs/recalls etc) which was pretty time sensitive. If I had already had my service record in a structured format along with the manufacturer's policies I feel like I could have responded with better preparation. Same for any other big maintenance items on the house, mortgage, insurance, etc.

And then there's the flip side--what do my policies and healthcare/loyalty plans cover that I'm not taking advantage of? What can be combined towards my goals etc.

For my initial system I'm not building full historical service history, insurance policies, etc. because it's a serious amount of scope on top of the core value prop, which is point-in-time "is this a good quote?". When I eventually do this, I'd need to do it proper with LLM + RAG, etc.

I do have the concept of an "asset" which could be a car, house, etc. and with enough basic info it's pretty easy for the LLM to cross reference common problems, or at least suggest questions that you should follow up on.

I'm leaving intent pretty free-form for now, the most friction I'm willing to add is 2 things:

- Basic enum preferences around budget and flexibility to help with prompting

- A claude code style "a few questions" follow up

Any additional form friction I think gets too complex.

It's funny, a lot of my research has been from subreddits for auto, homeownership, questions for people who work in trades, etc. Every time someone asks "is this quote fair", the response from the experts is almost always "But what do you want"

So in a time-sensitive repairs scenario, intent could "What get's my car safe to drive again for daily commute.... or for a long roadtrip". The output analysis could recommend which fixes are highest priority, where work could be split up, delayed etc.

how do you handle the LLM hallucinations in analysis? I like it for data extraction but i never trust it to analyze anything

First, I've spent a ton of time becoming opinionated about a normalized data model that supports the product experience I'm trying to build. This applies both to the extraction (line items, warranty sections, vendors, etc.) and the analysis portion. The latter is imperfect, but aligns philosophically with what I'm willing to stand behind. For example

- building outputs for price fairness (based on publicly available labor data)

- scope match (is vendor over/under scoping user's intent)

- risk (vendor risk, timeline, price variability, etc.)

- value (some combination of price, service, longevity, etc.)

I don't get much hallucinations in my testing, but overall it's pretty complex pipeline since it is broken down into so many steps.

I’ve built https://manor.app with the intention of it fitting the “user-friendly mass-market interface” you suggest. It’s essentially a “second brain” app for your home(s), covering inventory, documents, tasks/reminders, notes, etc. The inspiration is tools like Asana, Linear, etc I used in my career as a software engineer, tailored for the home.

It’s my sole area of focus, with more document retrieval and analysis (and UI polish) on the way.

> It's possible to do sensor fusion of all the outward facing cameras from your home

Is that legal though? I'm guessing it the US it might be, given the amount of cameras of public places you can see in various communities, but wonder how common that is. Where I live (Spain) it's not legal to just stick a camera on your house and record public places, you need to put the camera in a way so you're only filming your private property or similar.

I've got several cameras outside my house, but these recording 24/7 are adjusted to capture my property only (garden, front drive, entrances etc)

That's legal.

If someone gets recorded that's because they left the public land and entered mine.

> That's legal.

That makes sense, you're not actually recording public spaces, that'd be legal here too. "all the outward facing cameras from your home" makes it sound like that's including public spaces though, but maybe I'm just reading it too strictly.

The US gives you no expectation of privacy in public places and private property is generally do what you want. It gets murkier if your cameras are pointed at other private property (your neighbors).

Not a legal expert just what I’ve heard.

As I understand it (which probably isn’t well), expectation of privacy on private spaces in the US gets pretty wonky. Like being in plain view on a front lawn wouldn’t have expectation of privacy but being behind a fence would even if the fence doesn’t do a good job of blocking sight lines.

I call this the "Home Resource Planner"

Bricks are there (Home assistant, Frigate, Pihole,...)

Grocey

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   files are stored as BLOBs inside the SQLite database, so cp micasa.db backup.db backs up everything – no sidecar files

One of my first thoughts after getting a working prototype was: "Doesn't the car battery need to be replaced?"

So, yeah. This would obviously be called micarro.

And for doctors appointments... micuerpo!

Cool talk with Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite: https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

I feel like a lot of these types of apps could just be spreadsheets. Maybe a "smart" spreadsheet like Grist[0] executing Python code. Am I off-base there?

[0] https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core

Probably right. My brain is probably stuck in old-man spreadsheet land and I did not explore any new horizons that might have obviated micasa. That said, I also didn't want to invest a bunch of time in developing a domain specific app using spreadsheets as the API, I wanted to invest a bunch of time developing a domain specific app using AI. Might end up being a choice I regret!

That's all fair. It is a cool piece of work nonetheless.

For example I am thinking, what if I wanted to hook up my micasa instance to some other arbitrary self-hosted service? If it's an App that means bespoke code, with a spreadsheet stack it is trivial.

I agree. While I really like the idea of being able to query some of this data, it's another system to maintain. I have a system where I use a calendar, physical folder, and notes/folder in the cloud. Call me lazy.

I will say that I am slowly becoming a convert to 'talk to data' approach. Still, it is not without its flaws. At the end of the day, it still requires the user to update stuff and, from experience, this is where I fail and render all those project apps useless..for me specifically.

It sucks, because it sounds like what I really need is for someone to track it for me so that i can just review it if needed.

What I like about this is the inclusion of the Claude code pieces. I know there is a lot out there, but seeing a project that uses AI to produce features of this standard is great to see. I'd be interested in learning how the author developed features while building this out and how effective Claude/AI was while performing this building. Heck, I'd watch something where the author demonstrates their workflow. Nice job.

Looks good - I like the TUI a lot. The only thing with that type of interface is that there is no chance my wife would use it via the terminal. It would be cool if there was a web UI as well - so other members of the household could access and use it.

This.

If I am the only one who can use it and only from one computer, it would be entirely useless for my needs. I have several computers and also family members who would need access to that data. A Google Docs spreadsheet would be a better tool for my specific needs I think.

I think the same. Why overcomplicate and just use some online Spreadsheet like from Google Docs. The same or even less effort.

Quite clearly not the same (as in Google Docs will provide maybe 10% in terms of feature parity).

> Backup with cp.

cp is not a method to backup a SQLite file unless you can guarantee there are zero transactions in progress. See https://sqlite.org/howtocorrupt.html#_backup_or_restore_whil... for safe methods and consider switching your examples to use one of those.

Good point. I will definitely move away from cp.

This is the kind of tool that sounds niche until you own a house for a few years and realize you have no idea when anything was last serviced. "Single SQLite file, no cloud" is the right call. My home maintenance system is currently a mix of sticky notes and regret.

Thinking of this it would be amazing to have a TUI for home assistant. It's already so good at doing all the nuts and bolts of control and interacting with everything. But its UI is super heavy loaded JavaScript. It doesn't run well on old tablets either for this reason, sadly.

My overall philosophy for (my quite extensive) Home Assistant setup is “amy time a human interacts with the HA UI in any way whatsoever, that is a failure.” I don’t want dashboards, I don’t want a user interface at ALL other than for setting up new automation. The point of HA for me is the house should feel like the correct things happen by magic (and should be essentially unobtrusive and natural).

I'm pretty close to your approach too. I rather like lights, water features etc just switching themselves on and off as required. I use the UI to go off piste for me only and not for the wife (at home) or employees (at work)

HA's automations are getting rather good these days but Nodered is handy for when things get complicated. HA has a very neat Nodered integration maintained by Frenck, who is a HA dev.

My general directive is that any automation that is important should be able to work via manual means. Sadly my (Reolink) doorbell does not currently have a hard wired chime. The previous one (Doorbird) did.

At work, my office has 40 odd windows and I have slapped a zwave sensor on all of them and all doors. Its quite handy to have a blank list of open doors/windows on a panel (HA) next to the alarm panel as you set the alarm. The auto entities card is very useful.

Oh that's not my philosophy at all. I don't like too much automation because I'm very fussy as to what I want at one moment. It all depends on my mood which home assistant doesn't know. Sometimes when I enter a room I want the lights on, other times I don't, stuff like that. Like when the curtains are open and I'm walking around half naked. And sometimes I just like the dark and sometimes I need bright lights. Sometimes I need heat and sometimes sitting in 16 degrees (C) is totally fine. Yeah I'm weird I know :)

Also I'm really chaotic in terms of schedule. My mood and behaviour changes by the day.

I use it more as a monitoring and control tool.

Not saying your way is bad, it's more as HA is intended. But I'm just saying it won't work for me.

I'm similarly unpredictable in my home. Add to that the others in my house, and it's impossible to even guess what everyone's intentions are at any given time.

Sometimes I daydream about a "solo mode" where the timings on lights are tighter and my music can follow me around the house when I'm up at night and nobody else is. But most times I'm trying to find the get-out-of-way averages that keep everyone happy.

Some things work great: Automated lights everywhere. Automated dimming of lights at night or sunset or whatever. Notifications when the laundry is done, or the cat litter is ready to be changed, or someone is at the door, or the garage door has been left open - all great. What music to play in what room at any time? Always changes. When to "dim all the lights" because Plex started a movie? But my son is building Legos in the dining room, and my wife is knitting and needs the couch light on. Sometimes I want it, but not every time.

For those things having a single button press is still a huge win over opening multiple apps and getting the right things set the right way for each participant.

Same. My environment molds to my comfort, not the other way around.

I've honestly never explored HA. Is there a world where HA obviates micasa. That seems like a win, at least in terms of not having yet another piece of software duplicating an existing thing.

There's a CLI [1], LLM API [2], and REST API [3].

[1]: https://github.com/home-assistant-ecosystem/home-assistant-c...

[2]: https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/core/llm/

[3]: https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/api/rest/

I would love to have a TUI for Home Assistant!

This is awesome, love the sense of humor and just downloaded it and started adding data.

Only small piece of feedback is that I would use `$VISUAL` when opening the editor. When I tried to use `Ctrl+e` it opened nano which I haven't used in ages.

Edit: Oh looks like you use `$EDITOR` - I just didn't have that set. Awesome!

These are the projects which make me love Show HN!

Thanks for the feedback!

Did you hit this in the Docs open flow?

micasa will call xdg-open (linux)/open (mac)/cmd (windows) when opening a document, but there's nothing that's explicitly opening a text editor.

Sorry for the late reply, this was for when you're adding a renovation for instance and there is a section for "notes" - you can hit `ctrl+e` and it will open in an editor.

Looks like it doesn't register `$VISUAL` but does use `$EDITOR` not sure if that is a `xdg-open` behavior though.

Heck yeah! Love the VisiData shoutout. Echoing other people's desire for a web UI, mostly so I don't have to be the sole Maintainer of the Truth as the only resident household technomancer.

EDIT: alternatively, exposing the data/functionality via MCP or similar would allow me to connect this to an agent using Home Assistant Voice, so anybody in the house could ask for changes or add new information.

This is super interesting. I do have a GitHub issue for LLM-powered data entry: "Add a landscaping project to do the backyard. Still ideating, thinking a budget of $40k."

This makes me want to use visidata for my databases.

Funny enough, Saul and I recently hacked on getting visidata's Ibis integration updated, so you can use visidata for poking around databases of any size, really. You might like that, but also visidata has non-ibis support for SQLite I believe.

This is really cool. At the moment we use a Trello board to track all of our house jobs, projects, reminders and issues. Then we have Home Assistant for all of our sensors and such.

My only concern about something like this is the WAF. My wife uses Trello. She would likely not use terminal. Also she only uses a phone so lack of mobile app or website is another blocker.

But it’s a cool app

Just want to say, I appreciate your work on Ibis. I’ve been looking into building sort of a dbt-esque alternative on top of it and noticed how involved you’ve been with its development. I think it’s a cool piece of tech that deserves more attention.

Thanks! Curious to see what you build with it.

I think this is neat. I use org-mode for pretty much everything, which has all of these features I think, but sometimes there is nothing more motivating than a quick responsive UI to actually do something. This looks motivational.

My only pushback is using sqlite. I am a big fan of just using simple (structured) text files that can be edited by hand when needed. Your computer is more than capable of doing all the joining/querying/aggregating/whatever with the text file itself rather than relying on a database. I personally find these sort of file structures comforting as it means they can be easily modified in unsupported ways.

> When do I need to clean the dishwasher filter?

Dishwashers have filters??!?

Many have removable filters that you're supposed to clean periodically. If there's nothing obviously removable in yours then it might have a "self-cleaning" system that would be harder to take out and clean yourself.

They do in Europe. They have water softeners too that you have to fill with salt. Don't believe it's the case around the world.

More than you ever wanted to know about dishwashers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04

Wait until I tell you about your water heater's sacrificial anode. NOBODY replaces those.

I got an electric one so I never need to remember to replace mine!

yes, and the answer is every so often

It think this could be extended to other areas, like car (services, new lease etc), health (dentist, doctor etc), vacations, tax, banking... Basically a personal assistant like app that handles "life".

Yep, I have a few open issues about this. Cars and tools were next on my list.

I built something somewhat similar to this that's web app based (honeydew) but it's much more focused on DIY and doesn't include any of the quote/contractor stuff. It's absolutely focused on powering through a huge pile of todos from a home inspection with dependency tracking as well as remembering stuff (when was the last time you empty the washing machine filter).

It practice it alternates between annoying thing I dismiss the notifications from or use obsessively. Doesn't seem to be much in between

Do you have a link to the app? There's way too many hits searching for honeydew online...

The hallucination-in-analysis problem is real and often undersold. Pattern that works well: use the LLM only to structure already-extracted data (parse fields, normalize formats), then apply deterministic logic for anything numerical. That way the LLM is doing classification/extraction where it's reliable, and you're not trusting it to compute or compare values where it isn't.

Is there such a self hostable app available as a website? Kinda like Netbox / firefly but for your house?

Great project and very practical use-case.

One thing that would make this extra trustworthy for day-to-day use is a strict dry-run/preview mode: show exactly what fields/rows would change before writing state or triggering integrations.

Also +1 for stable entity IDs and an append-only history table (timestamp + source + diff summary). That makes rollback and auditing much easier when automations or scripts misbehave.

Thank you for the `nix app`!

Being able to launch it with:

     nix run github:cpcloud/micasa     

Actually we could go further and serve `micasa` via ssh:

    users.users.micasa = {
      isNormalUser = true;
      shell = pkgs.bashInteractive;
      openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = ...
    };
  
    services.openssh.extraConfig = ''
      Match User micasa
        ForceCommand ${micasaPkg}/bin/micasa
        AllowTcpForwarding no
        X11Forwarding no
    '';

    services.micasa-ssh = {
      enable = true;
      authorizedKeys = [ "ssh-ed25519 AAAA..." ];
      port = 2222;
    };

This is amazing and exactly the problem we have been trying to solve with a friend. We also considered the terminal but people give up on maintenance because they forgot to buy that replacement filter, or never got a reminder when they actually had time. Also, it is not uncommon for families to divide these as chores among different family members.

I personally love the TUI but I also know that for most homeowners this is too “advanced”. This is why we built our solution as a simple web app [1]

Great project! Best of luck.

[1] www.wellrun.house

This looks awesome but I think I might still prefer to have an agent make these changes. Not sure though.

In general, I love the juxtaposition of the most advanced computer technology ever (AI) causing an explosion in one of the OLDEST computer technology we've ever had (terminals).

I spend most of my day in a terminal now. It's just funny.

> This looks awesome but I think I might still prefer to have an agent make these changes. Not sure though.

Not entirely sure what you mean here, but the next big feature for micasa is an autopopulation pipeline. Upload a quote PDF and populate the project, quote, and vendor tables. It might not be viable ultimately, but I would love to see how far I can get.

Overkill? Definitely.

Yep that's exactly what I'm talking about. I don't think it's overkill. It feels very natural and filling out forms feels archaic to me (unless it's a "edit this quickly" where that's almost always faster than asking an agent.)

So I've been building a full piece of software to manage my small business. And it looks like traditional software (forms, tables, etc). But every single thing also has an MCP tool.

So then I find myself just talking to the agent especially as an input mechanism way more than clicking around and editing a form.

I'm just saying, as an input method, I think forms, TUIs, etc will be good as a backup. Over time, as you've outlined, we'd just say "here's a PDF, figure it out" and the agent just inputs the right values into the right fields.

That's how I've approached my run-my-business app. I have models/tables for clients, purchase orders, invoices, support tasks, everything. But my interaction is more like "Add me to all the active projects, set my cost rate to __" and it'll run 15 MCP calls and put the data where it belongs.

Or I'll ask "what invoices are way overdue?" and it'll run the MCP calls to get it, even though I have pretty dashboards.

Glad to see you're already thinking of it.

Wow! This is so cool. I really need to get my hands on TUI. It seems to be a growing trend. Maybe it's a stupid question, because I know about family members that have never opened a terminal - can a TUI app bundled with an icon to simply click and start it?

> can a TUI app bundled with an icon to simply click and start it?

Almost certainly. I personally don't use clicky things to the extent that I am able to avoid them, so I can't describe the specific mechanism or name any of the nouns/tools involved, but I'm pretty sure this exists.

You just create a shortcut to the binary in the dock or desktop on macos.

Is there a way to run the SQL commands directly, or easily see summed column values? I have the AI that can run it but can't seem to find a way to sum the columns in the TUI, just running them on the file externally. Would be nice to be able to Sum columns in the program especially conditionally based on the filters that are active

Not currently a feature, but open to it!

Pretty slick! And I really enjoyed the interactive, destructible house at the top :-)

Praise be to projects that use xdg paths before posting it to hn.

I found a bug. In the docs (https://micasa.dev/docs/guide/dashboard/), it says "Active Projects: 2" but should say "Active Projects: 20".

Projects have statuses, and not all of those statuses are active. Some projects are in the planning phase, for example.

My first thought with apps like this is always: couldn’t you do this in org mode?

This looks so much better than most project/product management tools out there.

In my wildest dreams, your project would turn into a jira that devs love.

This is basically what I want, but with a UI that non-techie spouse wouldn’t mind using. Though that doesn't seem to be your intended direction, which is fair.

We use Apple Reminders for grocery lists and Paprika for recipes, but something a little more organized than just a shared note for these sorts of things would be great.

I will probably check it out for myself though.

I have the same stakeholder requirements so we use Trello to track everything in our house

> Not sure what house would last that long

Not necessarily houses, but there are some old buildings around almost everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_extant_building...

A question from a novice: can't we have clicking on terminals?

We can! I just haven't thought through the interaction yet.

I'll be watching! Seems very nice!

Very cool! When on docs column, and pressing e to edit, it seems to just take you to edit the entire project, with no way to edit docs (which I am not sure what that even is supposed to be, I assume a way to attach files?).

This UX was a bit iffy for me, but I thought I'd experiment with it and decided to go with it.

When you edit an ID column, it opens a form editor to edit the entire row at once.

The thinking was to make all columns editable _in some way_, but ID columns are autogenerated and thus not designed to be directly manipulated.

I thought: since the ID represents a unique entity, in this case document, then it made some sense to make editing that editing the whole row.

That said, this is a bug even with the explanation I just gave: editing on the ID column of Docs doesn't show all the row's data in the form. Will fix that shortly.

I created a basic site to do some similar things as well: https://homemaintlist.com/

Need to revisit it and update it based on a lot of feedback I've received.

I definitely waffled a bit on multi-property support, but decided against it for initial launch. Multi-property avid terminal users seems even more niche!

I love TUIs and I love the way this looks and the concept behind it, but often I'm doing household stuff on my phone because I'm walking around checking on things or just taking photos of things.

Yes, one of the other comments alluded to this as well. I am also in this boat, so other than bizarroland LLM ingest stuff, I'll probably work on this next. Having never written a mobile app, I'm sure it'll be fine.

I didn't see it on the feature list, but it might be nice to allow it to run as a cron job and send email for reminders. These days, most mobile phones have an associated email like your-phone-number@vztext.com (depending on carrier), so you can send yourself text messages about chores and whatnot.

Or, perhaps just as good, have a way for it to dump out data as json, and could be consumed by some other send-the-email tool. There is the "-json" sqlite option, of course, but I'm not sure if your schema is meant to be stable.

I have a perl script for reminders like this that has been super handy over the 10+ years I've been using it. Never bit the bullet to put it in a nice UI or have a backing DB like this project, though.

This is looking pretty good. Going to run some sample data runs + might try this out.

Super cool. Installed. It would be great if the f and b keys for moving between navigation elements circle back to the first element once reached its end.

Heh, I actually turned that off because I kept getting confused about where I was. Perhaps there's a better UX there, or better styling that would make me less confused and keep the nav wrapping.

This is pretty cool and useful. I actually might adapt it to aid me in tracking projects around my dirt bike, similar tracking events.

Might have to start mimoto...

That is a beautiful TUI!

Looks nice, I like this TUI aesthetic, but I’m not sure I could use it on a daily basis. A self-hosted app or phone app might be more convenient

100% on the phone app. Maybe the web app is the phone app? Dunno. Being able to enter information as close to receiving as possible seems key actually. I'll probably poke on this soon.

It could be a native mobile app, but in that case you’d need to think about platforms, the App Store, and so on.

A progressive web app could be a nice alternative: just add the website icon to your phone, and you can open it in seconds.

The app could be self-hosted on a home server, and solutions like Tailscale would let you easily access it outside the house as well. A big plus is that you can open it on all your devices and have a unified database across them.

With a web app, you could even keep the TUI aesthetic - just style it like a CLI interface.

Nice.

I just use org-mode + lots of recurring tasks.

Like car.org has monthly tasks for check fluids, clean inside, clean outside. In April and October theres a task to remind me to change tires and as I'm German a task to remind me yearly to check the first aid kit (you get a fine if its expired and they spot it when they stop you).

So, almost every appliance has its org-file with routines. Same for me and my family, check vaccinations, see the dentist ...

So, if you are already using org, theres no need for an additional tool. Plus, its all text, just throw it in your git. Also, there's tools like beorg to have your org on your iPhone.

I love the logo, go ahead and click it!

Looks really cool. Agree on comments related to TUI. Maybe a simple interface running locally would be better.

The PDF-to-structured-data piece is actually the killer feature here. Getting quotes from contractors is already painful... half of them come as scanned PDFs with zero consistent structure.

If you can reliably extract line items, scope, and vendor info from those and link them to a project, that's where you'd actually save real time.

The TUI is nice but that pipeline is what I'd use this for.

Pretty cool

mise use -g github:cpcloud/micasa

and just start typing. I wish it had metric units and was translated, though!

Nice. I would definitely consider making it locale sensitive.

I wouldn’t want to use a terminal-only tool with no affordances for cloud sync for home management, something that inherently is likely to involve all members of a household who are likely not all proficient with terminal usage. You should ask your LLM to make something that can run as a home server and have different clients.

I also personally wouldn’t trust the database of all my important home info to a vibe-coded program.

Reasonable stance.

The same way that Gen Z wants shitty blurry photos of everything, I want more terminal UIs for everyday life. AI isn't going to give us beautiful native swift apps, it just gives us more garbage electron ones. So TUI would be a better aspiration I guess.

You can also run directly:

go run github.com/cpcloud/micasa/cmd/micasa@latest

TUIs have gotten so good lately. I love the design on this

Any ideas why Claude forces TUI application development?

Maybe it's that TUIs feel manageable with an agent. They can be well scoped without a ton of effort, which at least for me makes me a tiny bit more comfortable letting them write code.

It feels like something to do with front-end development limitations. I noticed a wave of TUI applications, all written by Claude from the initial commit.

I started a golang TUI last summer with Codex Web/Cloud because it felt more like a closed loop. It was able to manage pretty well end to end.

Every additional complexity hop probably increases the attrition rate for successful development, so TUIs end up the most frequent bean to bar currently possible for hobbyists.

I really wanted an iOS app. I considered a web app, or a localhost app. Each additional hurdle (containers, packages, builds, testing, running, OSes, browser integration, computer use) feels like upping the required power of the models.

It's pretty good at building TUIs. Although it's not bad at Swift/macOS either. But really I think the problem is that we don't have a great solution right now for cross platform native UIs that isn't a WebView (or entire Chrome browser), which doesn't feel very native. But every platform has a pretty good terminal now, even Windows.

Recently I asked Claude to build a communication tool and TUI was its first proposal. When I had a similar request with ChatGPT previously, it proposed node.js, I assume because there are more examples in its training data.

The pairing of Claude and TUI doesn't seem like a coincidence to me, perhaps there are fewer moving parts that are easy to coordinate?

It’s easy then run a web server for a web UI, but it still looks better than a regular CLI

Your quotes are great.

Why not keep everything in a simple text file?

Why use Dropbox if rsync / FTP exists :)

For the features. Text file has none of them.

I'm not sure if you're asking whether micasa should use a text file as its format, or if you're suggesting that a text file can be a substitute for micasa.

The latter.

I do things in my house too infrequently that I don't want to have to re-learn the UI of a tool again and again.

But maybe I'm not the target audience.

I often find myself wanting answers to questions that require linking data, and I also want to codify those links somehow, so a single-file, row-oriented database seemed like the appropriate way to get that.

You might actually be able to get away with less structure and just dumps thoughts and ideas, statuses, and documents into $AI and have it generate ad-hoc reports.

In which case, a text file might be the right interface.

Kind of a non-answer, I realize.

I suppose the answer is: because I had a relatively specific idea of what I wanted to build and I didn't consider not building it.

this is great to give upper middle class folks a sense of accomplishment.

Why is the text in cells truncated?

Here it an important th… |

Why?

Good question. Do you have a screenshot you can share?

Literally almost every frame of the gif on your landing page: title, type, project, etc.

Hard to balance the terminal font size, page styling, and desire to show something.

I decided that truncation was better than sacrificing font size or spending eternity noodling on page styling.

All ears if you've got any ideas.

Is there even a Wichita, Arkansas?

Probably not. The demo data is fake. Mostly there to test drive it with ephemeral data.

looks cool but how is it different from google sheets?

Probably not that different. One difference is that it runs in a terminal.

The testimonials cracked me up. I'm still managing my house maintenance on a spreadsheet like an absolute barbarian. I mean I was, until now. Does it come in Catpuccin?

I hadn't considered theming it differently, though in theory it should be adaptive to light versus dark terminals. I only use dark terminals and I couldn't be bothered to test that before there were any users, so if it doesn't work, I will happily task it out to an agent!

Now I kind of want custom themes...

This looks incredible

I want MiBoat ;)

That was exactly my first thought. Could I mod this use with boats. I already have some spreadsheets for tracking engine maintenance, etc, but this looks really cool.

"MiBarco", for consistency, altough you would need something with satellites or ham radio =)

mibarco, I dig it. Don't have a boat, but I can imagine they're a pile of dreams, shattered and otherwise.

The constantly changing "Frequently asked/entertained/daydreamed questions" bit constantly changing keeps moving everything below it up and down and it's really annoying. I am viewing it on a particularly small phone, however.

Missed chance to call it Mikasa

This is dope.

This is probably the most beautiful homepage + docs combo I’ve ever seen. The copy is awesome too. It feels human.

Great work.

Cool! Although I'd rather use Obsidian with the Tables stuff, so I get everything in my UI with photos, and I can share with mobile

I'm building a Home vault like this currently. With the new obsidian cli, you can do a lot more with letting an agent manage things and update dashboards, etc. for you.

Why not Excel?

Wow, this took me BACK!

My first computer was a 486, I was running MS-DOS (iirc) and there was an app that did just that with a very similar (Text)UI, anyone else used it/remembers the name?

isn't AI supposed to take care of all these home projects for me? ;)

I do like it. I just hope I don't have that many things that I have to fix in my house that I need a DB to track them.

You can also track aspirational things like renovations or other home related projects.

If you want a more powerful to-do list, look into IBM Maximo. It's the ultimate end all be all of todoMVCs.

The business is strong with Maximo: "Optimize asset investments with AI insights to cut lifecycle costs, align budgets and achieve your goals smarter and faster".

Optimizing with insights to cut lifecycle costs? Where do I sign up??

They are a todolist combined with a dependency tracker and a Cron job.

E.g. you own an old school Japanese car with no fancy computers. You only have a paper manual.

With something like Maximo, you can turn your maintenance into a DAG and routine stuff is tied to cron. Each Todo is called a "Work order". E.g. tire rotation every 10 000 miles, oil change every 15 000 air filter swap every 2 years.

Each day after you finish driving you enter into the Maximo GUI (or have an Arduino IoT sensor do it) your current mileage.

The timing chain also needs to be swapped every 5 yeard, but due to a quirk of engineering, it can only be done so after the oil had been changed.

Maximo automatically tracks everything, and after you are done, you have to upload a photo as proof that you have done the work.

It's a very simple system at its core, basically a glorified Todo list but entire industries run on it.

Because Maximo is used in nuclear power plants.

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why not just use a spreadsheet?

Valid question. Mostly because I wanted linking and couldn't be bothered to lookup vlookup. Naturally, the first alternative approach I considered was build a terminal app.