Logbook

A lightweight task tracker that also logs and summarizes my Claude sessions every day.

Source and install instructions on GitHub

As my Claude projects came to life and multiplied, I started having lots of extra ideas for future work, both big and small. Initially, I would just create ten Claude sessions in parallel, but I started hitting my brain's context limit of how much I could keep track of at once. I needed a way to stash and rank ideas, but off-the-shelf solutions like Jira, Linear and Notion come with a litany of features that I never use, which becomes distracting cognitive baggage.

I wanted more than just a Trello board because I spend 95% of my productive time in either Claude Code or Cowork, and needed post-facto visibility into my agent sessions. The Logbook started as cards, a one-line session summary, a summary for the day, and that's it. There were no story points, no epics and no obligation for cards and sessions to match. My most valuable asset in the AI age is my original ideas, and I wanted nothing that would slow them down.

Logbook with a backlog and ideas list on the left and the day's Claude Code sessions on the right — Today: the lists, the day's focus, and the session ledger

I also hypothesized that an AI-native productivity tool would contain vastly different features than its predecessors. As of September 2026, the future I see for the Logbook is as an autonomous loop orchestrator. You enter your ideas, and the Logbook itself judges which cards are ready for implementation, the exact input that it needs from you, builds in the background, and either ships it or seeks human review as needed. In the AI product world, the right choice of harness is everything. This would be a "first mate" as Kun Chen describes, with a UI instead of in the terminal.

Logbook showing a previous day with its summary, finished work and session ledger — Any past day: its summary, finished work and ledger

Some fun learnings: Initially, the daily summaries were surprisingly critical (I don't need Claude to shame me for using fewer tokens than the day before!). Also, Claude is bad at assessing what work is more or less important, and frequently centered its daily summaries on one-liner throwaway sessions. I calibrated the summaries to skew positive and focus on completion of bigger projects and clear wins.

Current limitations: Local machine-only, Claude-only

Logbook is open source under the MIT license: github.com/magratheazaphod/logbook.

Screenshots use synthetic data.