Kenzie DeskClerk

Inspiration

I've taken inspiration from all the apps I love and shoved them into a single app, then unified them with the latest AI has to offer.

What it does

Organizes everything you do in life and helps you focus on living it, rather than sitting on a computer all day. With the AI Clerk, tell it what to do with your voice from your phone. When at your desk, do your deep work, and Clerk will guide your focus with an intuitive, heuristic blend of the software you already know and the power of AI assistance with agentic, human-in-the-loop consent actions.

How we built it

Created design mockups, then broke the project down into epics and sprints with an explicitly defined architecture in mind. The process was to be a senior level systems architect and product designer, and merge the high-level expertise into a single document that uses AI, step-by-step, to methodically build out the project from an empty folder, to a deployable completed product.

Challenges we ran into

Cost management. I am unemployed and have been precariously employed for the last 7 years. Trying to not spend money while still meeting the deadline meant pacing and calculated discretion for any spend. This primarily meant using the Luna 5.6 model on "Light" thinking mode.

One of the issues with the model was getting it to remember to use the icons I provided, as well as ensuring it kept up with its test writing when adding/fixing/fine-tuning features. Indeed, AI is a reflection of humanity — seldom do I meet a dev whose code keeps pace with their test writing!

Due to finding out about this contest on the 18th and the due date being the 21st, I kinda panicked and didn't make my commits as regular and descriptive as I would have preferred. Especially toward the end just committing a message with something like "checkpoint."

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I prefer to be respectful to plants and animals, they are a reflection of the life human possesses. To that same tune, I prefer to be respectful to AI because it is a reflection of the sentience and linguistic decorum humans possess. If we are so easily rude or disrespectful to AI, I worry doing so also makes it easier to become rude or disrespectful to a human, either with my keyboard or my voice. I am contented to have kept a respectful posture throughout my communications with the non-sentient LLM.

That said, ChatGPT Luna 5.6 proved to be a particular challenge in this regard. It got extremely tiring having to remind it all the time to have it write tests first before implementing, to follow design patterns, to use provided SVG icons, it all wore me down and I found myself getting quite frustrated by the time I was making final QA passes. Other models and humans are stronger in this regard – I don't mind having to ask two or three times. But after 5 or 6, well, if I were a boss I'd begin considering letting the worker know they may be a better fit elsewhere.

What we learned

Be careful at the beginning of the project. If the AI misses a critical piece of architecture, you could find yourself wasting a lot of time. I didn't verify it was using TailwindCSS even though it was in the base planning doc. So, now I have to live without it unless I want to spend a bunch of time refactoring.

What's next for Kenzie DeskClerk

• Maybe add Google OAuth + calendar sync.
• Continue iterating a way for the backend app to setup with minimal technical knowledge required so that it can work as local-first while still having the power of the cloud by running it on your PC at home
• Additional fine-tuning of various UX quirks

Built With

• rust
• svelte
• tailwindcss
• tauri
• vite