SMF·TODY
Can a prompt replace Tody?
Home & family — cleaning schedule with task decay
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Tody's idea is one good mechanic: a task is not due or not due, it decays continuously from clean towards dirty at a rate you set, so the app always answers "what most needs doing right now" instead of showing an overdue list you learn to ignore. Implementing that is arithmetic over a last-done timestamp — a sitting, with no key, no service and nothing to reproduce.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a household task tracker around continuous decay rather than due dates.
A task has a name, a room, an interval in days, and a last-done timestamp. Its state is a single number: days since last done, divided by the interval. Below 1.0 it is fine; above, it is overdue by that factor. Everything the tool does is a sort on that number.
The main screen is one list, ordered by that ratio descending, with a colour ramp rather than a binary badge. Nothing is ever "overdue" in a way that accumulates guilt — a task at 3.2 is simply above a task at 1.4, and doing it resets it. That difference in framing is the entire reason this design works where a to-do list does not.
Marking done is one tap and writes a completion row. Never delete history: the completion log is what lets the tool suggest a better interval, by comparing how often you actually do a task with the interval you claimed.
Add a "I have twenty minutes" view: given a duration you enter, pick the highest-ratio tasks whose estimated durations fit, and show them as a short list. That single feature is what turns a tracker into something used on a Saturday morning.
Add room filtering and a per-room summary, since cleaning happens by room rather than by priority.
Run it as an offline-first progressive web app with local storage, syncing when it can reach your server. If more than one person uses it, merge by last-write-wins on the completion timestamp — completions are idempotent enough that this is genuinely fine.
Do not add streaks or a score. A cleaning app that makes you feel bad about a bad week gets deleted during the bad week.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 the mobile apps, which is where you mark a task done, standing in the room
- B.2 sync between everyone in the house, which is the paid tier
- B.3 the visual room-by-room layout that makes it feel like a game
- B.4 the starter task library, so you begin from an empty list
Prior art
- GrocyLicense: MIT
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: app polish and household sync
Ten dollars a year for something already on the phone in your pocket when you notice the bathroom, and nothing to run.
Questions
Can I import my Tody tasks?
No — Tody has no export, so the task list is retyped. It is twenty minutes for a normal house, and writing the list yourself is arguably the useful part.
How do I pick the intervals?
Guess, then let the completion log correct you. After two months, compare each task's median actual gap against its configured interval and adjust — the guessed number matters much less than having the history to fix it with.
What does it cost to run?
Nothing locally. A few dollars a month if you host it so several phones can share one list, which is more than the subscription.
What is the one thing that does not survive the rebuild?
Marking it done in the moment. Tody is on the phone in your hand when you notice the skirting boards, and a web app you have to remember to open catches the tasks you think about rather than the ones you see.
Related tools
Receipt