malvasia bianca

I’ve got an app that I’m working on. But, in this Claude Code era, I’m only doing a little bit of programming (in the sense of typing code), I’m mostly acting as a product manager for Claude Code instead.

And it turns out that being a product manager, especially with this sort of tight feedback loop, is quite a bit of fun! I can be using the app, think “hmm, there’s this way I’d like to use the app that it doesn’t currently support well”, and put a feature on the roadmap for the app. And then that thought is burbling around in the back of my head; as I run into similar bits of friction, I get a better idea for what this new feature involves and I bump it in priority. Soon enough, it becomes the next thing to do and I’ve got a decent idea of what it should look like, and off Claude goes.

That’s the broad feature side of the work but I also like playing with the details of the visual and interaction style. Last week, for example, I implemented a new feature that changed the flow for how you complete items in the app. Using it over the next few days, the new flow felt like an improvement, but a couple of the buttons in the new flow didn’t look right. So I looked at a couple of other apps for inspiration and found a different way of handling those buttons that seemed like an improvement; and it just feels good to be using the app today and say “yup, it really does feel better using it with the buttons done that way”!

It’s not a complete surprise that I’m enjoying this. One thing I’ve learned about myself over the years: on the one hand, I’m not a big ideas guy, my advantages don’t lie in greenfield situations. (This is part of the reason why you won’t see me founding a startup and why I’m resistant to titles like Architect.) But, while I’m not the best at coming up with ideas / plans from scratch in a blank space, my strengths flip once I’ve started finding my way into an idea (whether somebody else’s or my own): I can come up to speed on a situation unusually quickly, I can figure out what’s really going on with it, and I can get a sense for more elegant structures that might be lurking behind it.

This in turn lets me both take an existing situation and rework it to improve it, and also to see ways to extend the situation in a coherent way. (And this is a process that I enjoy!) I’ve been doing this most often with code over the last couple of decades, and code is where I’m best at this, but it’s a skill that applies more broadly; so now I’m getting to play around with it in app design. (I still have a lot to learn in that context, though…)

I haven’t actually talked about the app (which I’m currently calling Nudge) yet on this blog, but I’m looking for alpha testers, so I guess I should tell y’all something about it. One thing that I’m not good at yet is actually describing Nudge (this is part of the reason I want alpha testers, to help with that!), but its purpose is to help you remember things that you like to do every once in a while, but not on a strict schedule.

For example, the feeling that I first had that eventually led to me writing the app was going to a restaurant, enjoying it, and thinking “we’ve been here before and we enjoyed it back then, why has it taken us four years to return here?” There are restaurants that are in our regular rotation, and we don’t need help being reminded of those ones; but there are also restaurants that, for whatever reason (price or distance, maybe), we’re not going to come back to particularly soon, they’re more a “once every year or two” thing, and those ones would fall through the cracks.

I tried entering those restaurants into the task manager app that I use, and that worked, but the fit wasn’t great. If I created them in the app as recurring reminders, then that felt like more of an obligation than I wanted: I try to take recurring reminders seriously! Whereas if I created them as Someday/Maybe items, then that didn’t create the same obligation, but it required me to do the work of tracking how long it had been since I’d been there, and also the Someday/Maybe list can (by design) turn into a pit from which items rarely emerge.

Once I was sensitized to this pattern, I noticed it in a couple of other situations. It applies to recipes in pretty much the same way as it applies to restaurants: it would really be nice to have some place to look and get an answer to the question “what are meals that I like that we haven’t made in a while?” And, over the course of studying Nei Gong, I’ve learned lots of exercises, and while there are many that I don’t plan to ever do again, there are several that are genuinely useful, that it would be nice if I returned to every so often, but that aren’t part of my daily / weekly Nei Gong routine.

So, putting that all together, what I wanted was an app that lets you store items and a frequency with which you might want to do them, but in a way that tries to acknowledge the fact that that frequency is very approximate. The app should avoid nagging or creating a sense of obligation: no notifications, no red dots appearing on the badge icon. The app should be available if you find yourself in a situation where it would be useful (e.g. if you’re heading out for dinner but don’t have an idea of where to go), but also the app should be perfectly fine with you not opening it for days or weeks on end. I started writing Nudge a few months back, and I’ve been using it for real for about three months now; it’s being surprisingly useful for the Nei Gong use case, and while I haven’t been using it long enough to repeat almost any restaurants or recipes, I’m optimistic that it will be useful for that case too.

(Incidentally, I’m actually not thrilled with the name “Nudge”, because it does have just a hint of nagging? Hopefully I’ll come up with a better name as it gets closer to release.)

If that sounds interesting to you and you’d be willing to help me alpha test Nudge, I would be very grateful. Please leave a comment below or contact me via whatever other means you have to do so, and I’ll send you instructions for how to join the test group. Though I’ll mention the limitation that it’s an Apple-ecosystem-only app: it works on iPhone and iPad now, I’ll add Mac support in the next month or two, but adding Android / Windows / Linux support is not on the roadmap.