For a long time I have been organizing life stuff in Obsidian and making do with the limitations of Markdown.
Then I realized, actually, it's just as easy to make it pretty with HTML and just tell the AI what changes to make instead of sorting through the markup myself.
And since AI makes it so easy to whip up tools for tracking workouts (or anything else)... I can just encode my life organization as a webapp, host the data, and build whatever automation I need.
2026 is the year I roll my own... well, everything.
Mine is a React Router app hosted on Cloudflare, backed by a D1 sqlite database, secured by Cloudflare Access so I don't need to worry about building in auth. I'm the only user, after all. But I like to access my tools from my desktop, laptop, and/or phone.
Unlike many of my projects, this isn't open source. It's not meant for you. Yours will look very different from mine. But if you like the idea, here's some inspiration:
Tools!
This began as a place to host simple tools - my workout tracker, initially, and then an app to help me practice dry-fire drills under pressure of time and chaos.
"Vibe engineering" makes it easy to whip up these one-off tools, complete with test cases. You could buy a generic app from the store (probably with a monthly subscription to unlock the features you need)... or you could create your own, perfectly suited to your individual needs.
Friction is the enemy of consistency. And since you're building for yourself, you can eliminate a lot of friction that a developer designing for everyone is forced to work around. If you don't like something about your app, you can just change it - and then push straight to prod if you feel like it.
Dashboards!
My initial draft of the dashboard pictured was a static HTML page that I'd update by telling Google Antigravity "add a new project with tasks....". I had an AGENTS.md rule instructing Antigravity to simply commit and push after every change. Simple, malleable, I could make it the default home page on all my devices, and it was super easy to change.
Now, it's wired into my Toolbox, so I can do neat things like populating my weightlifting goal progress from my Workout Tracker's stats.
The Future!
Cursor, Antigravity, and LLMs in general have made a ton of bespoke applications possible that would have been infeasible six years ago. Not that you couldn't have done this then; but it would have been exhausting to keep it updated as your life changes (see above re: friction).
Now, there are dozens of possibilities. A few that come to mind:
- A bespoke budgeting app that ingests your transactions, categorizes them according to your rules with an LLM, and displays the budget exactly how you need it
- An MCP interface, so your LLM of choice (or a chat interface in the app) can interact with your tools/data directly
- A guided Daily Kickoff or Wrap-Up ritual to orient yourself for work
- Track dietary intake (perhaps with LLM support to translate meals to macros)
- A personal relationship management system - always remember your mom's birthday
Since this may be a long-lived personal project, don't forget good code hygiene: make refactoring easy, make a plan for database migrations, set up good automated tests and a deployment pipeline that checks for issues. Set up agent rules to keep your LLM's development style on track. Minimize the amount of time you spend fixing issues.
Malleable Software
There are limits, of course.
I'm not going to replace my email client... or calendars... and probably not even Obsidian. It's great for what it does.
But my imagination is expanding every time I stop myself from saying "nah, that's too much work" and instead say "well, let's give it a shot and see how it goes."