TaskPilot
An AI agent that turns your goals into a real, trackable plan — and actually acts on it.
Inspiration
Most "AI productivity" tools are chatbots wearing a task-manager costume — you ask, you get an answer, nothing real changes. I wanted an agent that crosses that line: it doesn't just talk about your goals, it writes real tasks to a real database and updates real state as you make progress.
What it does
Tell it a goal — "learn PostgreSQL in 7 days" — and it creates a Goal, breaks it into daily Tasks in Postgres, and when you say "I finished day 1," it looks up your real tasks (never guessing an ID), marks the right one complete, and reports progress calculated straight from the database.
How I built it
React/TypeScript/Tailwind frontend, Express/TypeScript backend, Postgres, and a Groq-powered agent doing real tool calling across four tools (createGoal, createTask, getTasks/getProgress, updateTask). One rule drives the whole system prompt: never act on assumed state — always read the database before writing to it.
Challenges I ran into
Prisma's install kept stalling, so I switched to raw parameterized SQL. Tailwind v4 dropped its config file format mid-setup. Groq deprecated my chosen model mid-build. The replacement model sent null instead of omitting optional args, breaking strict validation. And the agent's tool-loop cap was too low for a multi-day plan — it looked broken but was just cut off early.
Accomplishments I'm proud of
Watching a plain-English sentence turn into real rows in Postgres, and a follow-up message correctly find and complete the right task with zero guessing — that's the moment it stopped being "code that should work" and became something real.
What I learned
The gap between "looks correct" and "has actually run" is where the real bugs hide. Logging an agent's own tool calls turns a mysterious failure into an obvious, fixable bug in minutes.
What's next for TaskPilot
Finish rolling out auth everywhere, add real migrations, write tests against a live database, and let the agent revise an existing plan — not just create and complete tasks.
