Reinventing Task Management for the AI Era

A declarative task orchestration framework built on mature UNIX primitives

After evaluating the current state of software engineering, I concluded that existing todo solutions no longer satisfy the needs of modern development teams.

I needed something:

• cloud-native
• composable
• event-driven
• keyboard-first
• horizontally scalable
• YAML-free
• spiritually compatible with OpenBSD

Most existing solutions failed at least one of these requirements. Some examples:

• Electron applications consuming 1.4GB RAM to render checkboxes
• SaaS platforms requiring OAuth to remember "buy milk"
• AI copilots generating Jira tickets from Slack emojis
• Kubernetes operators orchestrating markdown files
• "local-first" apps performing 600MB sync operations over QUIC
• React todo apps with 1400 npm dependencies and a GraphQL gateway
• Emacs Org-mode

Naturally, I decided to build my own.

The result is a declarative task orchestration framework built on mature UNIX primitives:

TODO = write-manpage remove-yaml read-source

DONE = setup-repo write-makefile

.PHONY: todo done

todo:
	@printf 'TODO:\n'
	@for t in $(TODO); do printf '   %s\n' "$$t"; done
	@printf '\nDONE:\n'
	@for t in $(DONE); do printf '   %s\n' "$$t"; done

done:
	@printf 'Move it from TODO to DONE.\n'
	@printf 'Commit like an adult.\n'

Architectural Decisions

Unlike most modern productivity platforms, this system has several advantages:

• starts instantly
• no telemetry
• no account creation
• no subscription
• no venture capital involvement
• no JavaScript runtime
• no YAML
• impossible to "pivot to AI"
• works over SSH on a dying ThinkPad

The entire stack is inspectable using cat.

Or for enterprise observability workflows:

cat Makefile

For advanced debugging:

cat -v Makefile

Why Make?

make already solved task orchestration in 1977. The industry simply chose not to notice.

While modern engineers build distributed microservices to determine whether a checkbox is checked, make quietly continues to execute deterministic dependency graphs using plain text and common sense.

A radical approach today.

Future Roadmap

Planned enterprise features include:

• removing the remaining shell abstractions
• replacing text with comments in source code
• writing tasks directly into /usr/src
• OpenBSD pledge/unveil support for productivity isolation
• replacing standups with git log
• deprecating Scrum in favor of man make

Conclusion

Software engineering spent twenty years reinventing printf behind increasingly decorative web interfaces.

Meanwhile, UNIX already shipped the solution.

Again.