The archive · Consumer Apps · Product decision · 2025–2026
Dayflow's 'git log for your day' bet: 480-point Show HN, 7k GitHub stars
Open-source Mac app turns screen activity into an AI-written timeline and standup; the 2025 Show HN drew 480 points and the repo has 7.0k stars.
Dayflow
What the business is
Dayflow is an open-source, local-first macOS app that runs quietly in the background, captures lightweight screen chunks, analyzes them with a user-chosen AI provider (local models, Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude), and turns the day into activity cards, automatic standups, weekly reviews and a searchable, chat-able work journal.
How it started
Dayflow was built and released as open source (MIT) by solo developer JerryZLiu and introduced to Hacker News on 2025-09-24 under the title 'Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day.' The pitch: most time trackers only record which app was open, while Dayflow captures what you were actually doing — two hours in Cursor could mean shipping a feature, debugging auth, or getting lost in setup.
What happened
The Show HN thread (130 comments) immediately compared Dayflow to Microsoft's Recall and questioned the privacy trade-off; the author answered that Dayflow is local-first and open source, tested fully offline local models such as Qwen 2.5 VL on a 16GB MacBook Air through Ollama and LM Studio, and said users split roughly 50/50 between local and cloud AI. Commenters asked for wearable data sources and distraction-spark analysis. The repo kept shipping: 1,667 commits and 424 forks by 2026-09-04, adding weekly reviews, distraction tracking, timeline export and automatic cleanup.
How it ended up
Still live and actively developed as of 2026-09-04; the material shows no company, funding or paid tier — Dayflow remains a free open-source app maintained by its creator.
Background
Dayflow is an open-source, local-first macOS app that runs quietly in the background, captures lightweight chunks of screen activity, and uses a user-chosen AI provider to reconstruct the day as a timeline of activity cards. From that timeline it drafts daily standups, weekly reviews and answers to natural-language questions about where time went — a work journal that writes itself instead of requiring timers or manual notes.
The founding bet, pitched on 2025-09-24 as 'a git log for your day,' was that people will not keep manual time logs but will accept an always-on journal when the AI turns raw screen activity into real context: Cursor for two hours could mean shipping a feature, debugging auth or getting lost in setup, and window titles alone cannot tell the difference. Privacy was the wedge — recordings and the database stay on the Mac by default, and users can run analysis entirely through local models.
The Show HN drew 480 points and 130 comments, with the thread split between comparisons to Microsoft's Recall and serious questions about offline AI quality, wearable data sources and distraction analysis. By the 2026-09-04 crawl the repository had grown to 7.0k stars, 424 forks and 1,667 commits, with no company or paid tier disclosed — Dayflow is still the free, open-source product of a solo maintainer.
What has to be true
- The wedge is context over app names: every knowledge worker who dreads writing standups is a candidate, and the product's core output is a report they can actually send.
- Local-first storage plus open source directly answers the objection that sank Microsoft's Recall, turning the scariest feature in the category into its trust story.
- Bring-your-own-AI removes both a privacy ceiling and a cost problem: users trade off local models versus Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude instead of being locked to one backend.
- A free, MIT-licensed release with a Homebrew cask lowered the cost of trying a screen-recording app, which is why a solo project could reach 480 HN points and 7.0k stars.
What can be applied
Automatic capture beats manual tracking only when summaries carry context, not app names — and for a screen-recording app, open source and local-first are the trust that makes the bet possible.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-04 Dayflow is live and open source: the repo shows 7.0k stars, 424 forks and 1,667 commits, with a Homebrew cask and signed macOS releases. There is no stated company, funding round or paid product in the material — the app remains a free, local-first work journal whose central tension, capturing screen activity on a machine you trust, is answered by provider choice, local-first storage and automatic cleanup. The 2025 Show HN thread remains the clearest public evidence of demand.
Sources
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