Astrid Tasks was a popular shared to-do list and lightweight project management app. The vision at the time was to help people get more done with help from friends, virtual assistants (think Task Rabbit, Doordash, or Fiverr), and robots (at the time, simple automation). Unfortunately, it was before its time. We sold the company to Yahoo in 2013 and then shut it down. Last fall, I decided to rebuild the vision from scratch using AI coding tools. Like many others I started with Cursor, then transitioned to Claude Code, and dabbled with Gemini. At some point I got things working the way I wanted them to work, and then decided to start using Astrid to maintain Astrid.
It worked. I’d create a task, assign it to an agent, review the PR and staging preview (sometimes!), merge it, and move on to the next thing. It was pretty close to getting the app to build itself.
I was able to get a working product for web and iOS—alone—in spare hours. A decade ago this required a team and venture funding. I worked with a number of amazing engineers and designers to bring Astrid to life. Now I was able to pull it together as a side project on weekends. The hardest part was filling out forms. Registering an LLC, a trademark, setting up an Apple Developer account and even that wasn’t super difficult.
A few predictions from my experience.
- Marketing will be key. As the effort to build drops to close to zero, the bottleneck in consumer product companies will be getting your product discovered and used.
- Consistent context is critical, for humans. Last year the term “context engineering” became popular as an evolution of “prompt engineering” as the way to manage what an AI model knows and when. I’m convinced this context engineering for AI is easy compared to context engineering for humans. We forget things, get confused, and want to have a “shared context” on teams, in families, and with friends even as AI enables anyone to build their own custom tools. My prediction is most of us will continue to use common tools we individually and collectively become comfortable using. Context engineering is harder with humans than with AI.
- Disruption is certain. In 2023 I wrote a post about uncertainty in the age of AI. Now I think it is less about if there will be disruption and more of a question of how fast and how far reaching.
If you have gotten this far, could you take a moment to try Astrid? It will just take a moment to download it, give it a 5-star rating, and maybe even a positive review. There is even a list where you can report bugs and feature requests – and you better believe, I’ll be assigning those tasks to Astrid!
Astrid is available at: Astrid.cc and on the iOS App Store.