jdo ✨

Just Do One thing at a time

An AI-powered terminal app for people who want to achieve their goals without drowning in project management overhead. Have a conversation, and jdo turns your intentions into a structured plan you can actually follow through on.

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🤔 Why jdo?

The Problem with Todo Apps

Your todo list is a graveyard of good intentions. Todoist, TickTick, and their cousins are brilliant at collecting tasks—but terrible at helping you complete them. The list grows. The guilt grows. You reorganize, re-prioritize, declare "inbox zero"... and three weeks later you're drowning again.

The uncomfortable truth: A todo list has no skin in the game. Nobody's waiting. Nothing happens if you don't do it. That's why 41% of todo items are never completed.

The Problem with Scheduling Apps

Sunsama and Motion took a different approach: time-block everything. If it's not on your calendar, it doesn't exist. The AI schedules your tasks around meetings, and you just... follow the plan.

Except you don't. Because life happens. Meetings run over. Energy crashes. And now you're rescheduling the same task for the fourth time this week, watching the AI shuffle your failures into tomorrow.

Scheduling apps optimize for time. But time isn't the bottleneck—integrity is.

A Different Philosophy

jdo is built on a simple principle from the Meta Performance™ Institute:

Commitments are promises, not preferences.

A commitment isn't a task you might do. It's a promise to a specific person (your stakeholder) to deliver something specific by a specific time. When you make fewer commitments and keep them all, something shifts. People trust you. You trust yourself. Work actually gets done.

This is what MPI calls integrity—not morality, but workability. The engine that makes everything else possible.

The three rules of integrity:

1. 🎯 Do what you said, by when you said
2. 📢 Notify stakeholders as soon as you know you can't
3. 🧹 Clean up the mess caused by any broken commitment

jdo doesn't let you dump 47 items into a list and forget about them. Every commitment has a stakeholder, a deliverable, and a due date. You make fewer promises—and you keep them.

How jdo is Different

	Todo Apps	Scheduling Apps	jdo
Mental model	Infinite list	Calendar blocks	Promises to people
Accountability	None	Time pressure	Stakeholder relationships
When you can't deliver	Mark incomplete, feel guilty	Reschedule, feel guilty	Notify stakeholder, clean up, maintain trust
Success metric	Tasks checked off	Hours scheduled	Commitments kept
Core belief	More organization = more done	Better scheduling = more done	Fewer promises kept = more done

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💬 The Conversational Difference

Most productivity tools ask you to learn their system. jdo asks you one question: What do you want to accomplish?

Tell it in plain language. The AI extracts goals, milestones, commitments, and tasks—organizing everything into a hierarchy that makes sense. No forms to fill out. No clicking through menus. Just talk about what matters to you.

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⚡ Features

💬 Conversational Interface	Chat naturally—the AI structures your goals for you
🏗️ Flexible Hierarchy	Visions → Goals → Milestones → Commitments → Tasks
⌨️ Keyboard-First Design	Navigate everything without touching your mouse
🔄 Recurring Commitments	Set it once, generate instances automatically
💾 Draft Recovery	Crash mid-thought? Pick up right where you left off
🤖 Multiple AI Providers	Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter—your choice
🔒 Local-First Storage	Your data stays on your machine, always

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📦 Installation

Requirements: Python 3.11+ and uv

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/JRedeker/jdo.git
cd jdo

# Install dependencies
uv sync

# Run the app
uv run jdo

🔧 Install uv if you don't have it

# macOS/Linux
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

# Windows
powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

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🚀 Quick Start

1. Configure your AI provider

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="sk-ant-..."

🔌 Using a different provider?

# OpenAI
export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-..."
export JDO_AI_PROVIDER="openai"

# OpenRouter
export OPENROUTER_API_KEY="sk-or-..."
export JDO_AI_PROVIDER="openrouter"

2. Launch

uv run jdo

3. Press n to start a new chat and describe what you want to accomplish.

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⌨️ Keyboard Shortcuts

Navigation                      Views
─────────────────────────────────────────────────
n   New chat                    g   Goals
s   Settings                    c   Commitments
q   Quit                        v   Visions
d   Toggle dark/light mode      m   Milestones
                                h   Full hierarchy
                                o   Orphan commitments

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🧠 How It Works

The Hierarchy

jdo organizes your work into five levels. Use as many or as few as you need:

Vision ─────────────── "Become financially independent"
   │
   └── Goal ────────── "Build passive income stream" (due: Dec 2025)
          │
          └── Milestone ─── "Launch info product"
                 │
                 └── Commitment ─── "Send draft to editor by Friday"
                        │
                        └── Task ────── "Write course outline"

Example Conversation

You: I want to get promoted to senior engineer this year

 AI: I've created a goal for you:

     Goal: "Get promoted to senior engineer"
     Due: December 31, 2025

     What would make this happen? Any specific milestones
     you're thinking about?

You: I need to lead a major project and improve my system design skills

 AI: Added two milestones:

     • Lead a major project
     • Improve system design skills

     Want to break either of these down into specific tasks?

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⚙️ Configuration

Environment Variables

Variable	Default	Description
JDO_AI_PROVIDER	anthropic	Provider: anthropic, openai, openrouter
JDO_AI_MODEL	claude-sonnet-4-20250514	Model identifier
JDO_TIMEZONE	America/New_York	Your local timezone
JDO_DATABASE_PATH	(platform default)	Custom database location

Data Location

All data is stored locally using platform-appropriate directories:

Platform	Location
Linux	~/.local/share/jdo/
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/jdo/
Windows	%LOCALAPPDATA%\jdo\

Files:

• jdo.db — SQLite database containing all your data
• auth.json — OAuth tokens (if using browser-based auth)

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🛠️ Development

Setup

git clone https://github.com/JRedeker/jdo.git
cd jdo
uv sync --all-groups

Commands

uv run jdo                              # Run the app

uv run ruff check --fix src/ tests/     # Lint
uv run ruff format src/ tests/          # Format
uvx pyrefly check src/                  # Type check
uv run pytest                           # Test

Structure

src/jdo/
├── ai/         Agent, tools, context extraction
├── auth/       OAuth flows, API key management
├── commands/   Chat command parsing
├── config/     Settings, paths
├── db/         SQLite engine, migrations
├── models/     SQLModel entities
├── screens/    Textual screens (home, chat, settings)
├── widgets/    Reusable UI components
└── app.py      Application entry point

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📋 Requirements

• Python 3.11 or later
• uv package manager
• Modern terminal with Unicode support
• API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter

Tested on: macOS, Linux, Windows (Windows Terminal recommended)

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🤝 Contributing

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch
3. Ensure ruff check and pytest pass
4. Submit a pull request

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📄 License

MIT

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_{Built with 💜 using Textual · PydanticAI · SQLModel · Rich}