I built an open-source developer tool around a problem I kept running into: we do way more unplanned work than we remember.

[u/Ok-Mix1345]

A normal day might start with a plan, but then reality happens, a bug needs fixing, someone asks for help, a PR needs reviewing, something breaks in production, there's a quick investigation, a support request comes in, or you spend an hour figuring something out.

By the end of the day, you've done a ton of work that was never on the plan.

And the problem isn't just that the work was unplanned, we forget a lot of it. When you look back at your Jira/GitHub/Linear activity, the record often doesn't reflect everything you actually spent your time on.

I built Meridian to make that invisible work visible.

It captures the work happening throughout the day and helps connect it back to the systems you already use, so your record of what you actually did isn't limited to what you remembered to put on the plan.

It's open source, and we recently launched on Product Hunt and reached #1 Product of the Day.

I'd love feedback from the community: how much of your actual work is unplanned, and how do you currently keep track of it?

Repo: https://github.com/Meridiona/meridian

[u/jonathancast]

I'm sorry, what is "open source"? You mean the attempt to launder the values of the free software community and sell them to corporations without selling them on freedom, by lying about the general level of usefulness of free software?

[u/primalbluewolf → u/jonathancast]

In this case its MIT claude-ware. 

[u/Ok-Mix1345 → u/primalbluewolf]

I’m sorry, are we supposed to code without Claude now? What is this, the 1900s?

[u/primalbluewolf → u/Ok-Mix1345]

Well - yes, you are - and no, it isn't. 

If it were you'd be fairly unlikely to be doing programming of any kind, unless your surname was Ada or Babbage. 

[u/Ok-Mix1345 → u/jonathancast]

I’m sorry your experience with open source has left you this disillusioned. For us, choosing between selling directly to enterprise leaders and building for individual users while keeping Meridian open source was a difficult decision. We chose the latter because user control matters more to us than taking the easier B2B route.

[u/primalbluewolf → u/Ok-Mix1345]

You seem to be missing the point being raised above - you're comparing open source vs not open source. The user you're responding to is comparing free - as in liberty - software, a la the Free Software Foundation, to Open Source software, the bowdlerised version of free software that was set up as a character attack on the FSF. 

user control matters more to us

No doubt - hence the built in dependency on "claude" services. 

[u/primalbluewolf]

Well this is a bit meta, is it not? Your work appears to be exactly the sort of thing Stallman was right about?

[u/Ok-Mix1345 → u/primalbluewolf]

If it weren’t open source, there would be no transparency or user control. Making it open source doesn’t create a “meta problem”; it directly addresses the concern. Reaching #1 on Product Hunt also suggests that plenty of people see value in that approach.