Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal (micasa.dev)
I built it because I was tired of losing track of everything in notes apps, and "I'll remember that"s. When do I need to clean the dishwasher filter? What's the best quote for a complete overhaul of the backyard. Oops, found some mold behind the trim, need to address that ASAP. That sort of stuff.
Another reason I made micasa was to build a (hopefully useful) low-stakes personal project where the code was written entirely by AI. I still review the code and click the merge button, but 99% of the programming was done with an agent.
Here are some things I think make it worth checking out:
- Vim-style modal UI. Nav mode to browse, edit mode to change. Multicolumn sort, fuzzy-jump to columns, pin-and-filter rows, hide columns you don't need, drill into related records (like quotes for a project). Much of the spirit of the design and some of the actual design choices is and are inspired by VisiData. You should check that out too. - Local LLM chat. Definitely a gimmick, but I am trying preempt "Yeah, but does it AI?"-style conversations. This is an optional feature and you can simply pretend it doesn't exist. All features work without it. - Single-file SQLite-based architecture. Document attachments (manuals, receipts, photos) are stored as BLOBs in the same SQLite database. One file is the whole app state. If you think this won't scale, you're right. It's pretty damn easy to work with though. - Pure Go, zero CGO. Built on Charmbracelet for the TUI and GORM + go-sqlite for the database. Charm makes pretty nice TUIs, and this was my first time using it.
Try it with sample data: go install github.com/cpcloud/micasa/cmd/micasa@latest && micasa --demo
If you're insane you can also run micasa --demo --years 1000 to generate 1000 years worth of demo data. Not sure what house would last that long, but hey, you do you.
106 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 90.7 ms ] threadNot necessarily houses, but there are some old buildings around almost everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_extant_building...
go run github.com/cpcloud/micasa/cmd/micasa@latest
On a cost basis, it no longer makes sense--practically--not to use visual/text/audio intelligence to manage such a large asset. We just don't have the user-friendly mass-market interfaces for it just yet.
It's possible to scan every manual, every insurance policy, ingest every local bylaw. It's possible to take a video of your home and transform it into a semantically segmented Gsplat of [nearly] everything you own. It's possible to do sensor fusion of all the outward facing cameras from your home. And obviously agents like OpenClaw can decide what to do with all of this (inventory, security, optimization, etc).
EDIT: alternatively, exposing the data/functionality via MCP or similar would allow me to connect this to an agent using Home Assistant Voice, so anybody in the house could ask for changes or add new information.
In general, I love the juxtaposition of the most advanced computer technology ever (AI) causing an explosion in one of the OLDEST computer technology we've ever had (terminals).
I spend most of my day in a terminal now. It's just funny.
In my wildest dreams, your project would turn into a jira that devs love.
For the features. Text file has none of them.
We use Apple Reminders for grocery lists and Paprika for recipes, but something a little more organized than just a shared note for these sorts of things would be great.
I will probably check it out for myself though.
Need to revisit it and update it based on a lot of feedback I've received.
[0] https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core