flowpilot
A small desktop app that fills in my daily timesheet. One click on the dock icon, and the form I would otherwise retype every evening is done.
A desktop app I built for myself that does exactly one thing: click the icon, and the timesheet I have to fill in at work is filled in.
Why it exists
The entry is the same on most days. Two minutes of typing, one or two actual decisions in it, repeated every working evening — which is precisely the shape of a task that should not be done by hand. Two minutes a day is about eight hours a year spent retyping something I already knew before I opened the form.
It fills in the same routine entry I would have typed myself. The point is removing the data entry, not the deciding.
How it's built
Electron and TypeScript. There is no window to navigate and no settings screen to get lost in — the entire interface is one icon, and clicking it is the whole interaction. A tool you have to think about before using is not much better than the form it replaces.
Skeleton — replace this paragraph. Describe how the fill happens: whether it drives the page, calls an endpoint directly, or something else; where the day's values come from; and what it shows you afterwards so you know it worked. Keep it at that level — no employer, no internal system names, no URLs.
What was actually hard
The interesting problems in a tool like this are the ones nobody anticipates on day one. Worth writing up whichever of these you hit:
- Clicking twice. One click should fill today once. What happens on the second click, or on a day already filled in?
- Days that are not ordinary days. Weekends, holidays, leave — the cases where the right answer is to do nothing.
- Credentials. Where they live, and why that is not a file next to the source.
- Silent failure. A tool that quietly does nothing is worse than no tool, because you stop checking.
What I would do differently
Being specific about a tool's limits reads far better than pretending it has none.