Astrid — an open, card-based project assistant
Hey all 👋 Sharing something I've been building: Astrid, a project assistant that lives entirely in plain files you own — no database, no SaaS, no account.
The problem it tackles: most of what running projects involves is scattered — a commitment made in a hallway, a decision buried in an email thread, a risk everyone knows about but nobody wrote down, a deadline whose first witness is the customer. Astrid turns that scatter into a small set of durable JSON "cards" that a Claude project (plus a few tiny scripts) read. It reads your cards before it says anything, tells you what's urgent / late / stalled / overdue to report, and turns the things you mention in passing into tracked work before they fall through a crack.
It walks from the project-card (the anchor) down to the action-card (the work) — nine card types in all: project, action, meeting, contact, plus risk, issue, decision, milestone and deliverable, every one linking down to the actions that move it. Portfolio reporting and stagnation-spotting are built in: Astrid knows when a project is overdue for a steering report and which action hasn't moved in three weeks — and it leads with that.
Two short videos:
- ▶ The explainer — project-card to action-card (1:40): https://youtu.be/Hv_I9FLQ6gA
- Meet Astrid — the intro (2:40): https://youtu.be/hMdUBDRynO8
One deliberate choice I want to be upfront about: the UI is minimal on purpose. The only interface that ships is a single, read-only dashboard.html. That's not laziness — it's the bet. The product is the data model, not a front-end. I want this to be a core you shape to your own taste.
So this is a "Show Your Work" post and an open invitation in one — I'd genuinely love for this to become a community build:
- Build a UI on top of the cards — a web app, a TUI, a mobile view, an inline editor, an Obsidian/Notion sync. The JSON schemas are the contract; the dashboard is just one renderer.
- Build a specialist or researcher that reads the same cards — a status-report writer, a stakeholder-comms drafter, a risk reviewer, an email→card bridge. (Astrid already has a sibling, Miles, a
meeting-reflection coach that shares the exact same data model — that's the pattern.)
- Add card types, automations, integrations. The data model is open by design — see CONTRIBUTING in the repo.
If you build something, drop it back in this thread and I'll link it. Curious what you'd reach for first — a UI, or a new specialist? My entry to the researcher-competition fits in snug (see https://github.com/astetic-dev/meeting-coach-miles).
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Arjen Stet
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Astrid — an open, card-based project assistant
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