About LittleCloud

Why I'm building this

I've spent my career in IT, and I wanted to actually build with AI rather than just read about it. So LittleCloud is where I learn in the open, turning the goals and household chores I already juggle in my own life into small, dependable apps. The furnace filter really does get logged when I change it; the streaks in SAGE were mine before they were anyone else's.

That's also the quality bar: a tool ships only once it has earned a permanent spot in my own daily routine. There's no growth target here and nothing to sell you, just a hobby project run with professional habits.

The one rule everything follows

Every LittleCloud app is built the same way: a deterministic core with AI only at the edges. The parts that must be correct (due dates, calendar math, streaks, whose data is whose) are plain, predictable code that gives the same answer every time. No AI ever computes your schedule, guesses a number, or decides what's overdue.

The AI sits at the edges, where humans are: it reads “done: furnace filter” and calls the boring code that does the logging; it phrases the morning briefing; it asks a clarifying question when you're ambiguous. If the wording engine vanished tomorrow, your data, your schedule, and every date on your board would be exactly right. It would just be worse company.

Two corollaries fall out of that rule. Your chat identity is verified by the platform, not by the model: the bot knows who's messaging because Discord says so, so it can never be talked into showing someone else's board. And the bots themselves are deliberately narrow: HEARTH's bot can discuss your household tasks and open a ticket, and that's all it can reach.

What's under the hood

For the curious, all of it runs on one small server, and every piece has a plain-English job:

• Containers: every app runs isolated in its own box, so one thing misbehaving can't take the rest down, and restarts are one command.
• A boring database: each app keeps its records in its own simple database file. Easy to back up, easy to reason about, impossible to tangle with another app's data.
• Agents for chat: each product has its own bot with its own keys, run by an agent platform that handles Discord and schedules the daily jobs. It also words SAGE's morning briefing, while HEARTH's due-date nudge is written by plain code.
• Three separate homes: LittleCloud, HEARTH, and SAGE each have their own folder, their own code repository, and their own version number, sharing one private network so they can cooperate without tangling. The workshop no longer lives inside one of its own products.
• Automatic HTTPS: one proxy in front of everything fetches and renews its own certificates, so every page you touch is encrypted without anyone remembering to renew anything.
• Cookieless counting: page views are counted by self-hosted, aggregate-only analytics. No cookies, no ad networks, no profiles (the Privacy page says it formally).

Keeping it honest when nobody's watching

A tool that holds your maintenance history has to be dependable at 3 AM, not just in a demo. So the system watches itself. Databases are copied safely every night and kept for two weeks, and a watchdog tattles if a daily job silently stops running, because the scariest failures are the quiet ones. On top of that sits an ops console I built for myself: it watches every server and app against rules I can read, and when something is wrong a lamp turns amber and says why in a plain sentence.

Anything that changes the system gets previewed, confirmed deliberately, and written to a log with a name attached (mine, usually). That's habit from a career of running systems where “probably fine” isn't an answer.

Built in the open, verifiably

“Building in public” here isn't a marketing feed. Every single change is posted to a public build-log channel on the Discord as it ships: the unedited stream, fixes and all, which also means a slow month is visible as a slow month. The Progress page tells the same story curated and in plain English; the Roadmap says what's next and, just as deliberately, what's only a direction. When plans change, the pages change. A few features exist because someone asked for them in chat.

Where things stand today

The apps

• HEARTH: home, vehicle & asset maintenance tracker. Live
• SAGE: self-accountability for goals & encouragement. Live

HEARTH is your own private board for everything your home and vehicles need: recurring upkeep with real calendar math, one-off jobs with deadlines, a Garage where each vehicle carries its own mileage and tasks, a month calendar view, and a bot you can tell in plain words that a job is done. It stays quiet unless something is actually due, so it never becomes daily noise you learn to ignore. Sign-ups are open (username and password, or Discord), starter packs mean day one isn't an empty page, and the no-login demo resets itself nightly so you can poke at a realistic board first.

SAGE is the coach: a morning briefing, habit streaks, goals with honest check-ins, and a Sunday review of how the week actually went, on its own board at sage.littlecloud.dev. It spent a long time as a party of one on purpose, because a coach that nags, guesses, or flatters is worse than no coach. It earned its way out of that, and anyone can create an account now with a username and password or with Discord. There's a SAGE demo to look through first, the same as HEARTH's.

Come hang out

The LittleCloud Discord is where it happens: open discussion, ask the bots about each app, and suggest what to build next. Each app has a how-to, a place for ideas, and a tickets channel: if a bot can't do something you ask, it opens a private ticket only you and I can see, so a request never gets lost. No role or sign-up needed to look around, and the HEARTH demo is open to anyone.

Not a Discord person? The anonymous feedback box works just as well, and every note lands on my desk.

Who's behind it

I'm Michael, an IT professional and lifelong tinkerer, learning to build with AI and Python in my off-hours. LittleCloud is a one-person project, built carefully and shared as it grows. If you'd like to follow along, I post over on X.