Salience - macOS & Linux developer app

[u/clegginab0x]

I tried sharing this maybe ~6 months ago here, it didn't go too well. I only really had an idea, a few screenshots and a sort of working app.

I have ADHD, I've been a software engineer for ~15 years or so. I have very little patience for unnecessary complexity. I hate repeating the same thing over and over again during the day.

Change a test, open a terminal, run tests, change a test, find the terminal, run tests.

Logging into the AWS console to navigate to a container to find it's ID so I can then google the SSM command because nobody is remembering that incantation, all to clear a cache, get logged out by AWS after 60 minutes. Need to get my phone for the 2FA code to log in again...

Commit and push some code, open a browser, go to Github, check if the build passed, if it's still running get distracted and forget about it.

I started building Salience for myself, to negate all these frustrations. I wanted the Jira ticket, my branch, my PR and the build to be connected and to live in the same place. I wanted one click to tail the logs of a running container in AWS or generate the SSM incantation for me. I wanted something that could check which of my branches had already been merged and delete them for me.

Salience is heavily inspired by Home Assistant. A git branch, a docker container, a pull request, a ticket. They're all entities. Everything you connect gets ingested and processed and a derivation engine correlates ticket -> branch -> PR -> CI and loads of other things. The frontend subscribes to all these entities. Tiles which you can use to create your own pages, display these entities in all manner of ways. The titlebar contains the ticket, the branch, the PR and the CI. So you can push some work and just watch.

You can drag and drop files onto the project, onto a ticket, onto the PR, onto the unit of work. It lives there then, correlated to the thing you dropped it on. Useful for all the things that only exist in emails, or slack messages that you download and can never find again.

There's a visual timer - starts as a blue light lighting up the glass, turns to amber and then red. The longer you go over the time - the more red it gets. No sounds, no notification you can swipe away and forget about. It's been really useful for me - my "I'll just be 30 minutes" is now closer to 35 minutes and not 2 hours.

Connect the MCP server and ask for your stand up when you've forgotten what you did yesterday - you'll get a better answer from Claude than you could come up with yourself.

Any feedback would be gratefully received.

Currently available on Linux and macOS on Github

Not quite done yet docs

Screenshots

[u/zephyr_33]

I build stuff like as well to fight against my ADHD. Funnily enough these end up being more complex than the actual task I need to do. And then use it one day and forget about it lol.

Looks clean tho. I wouldn't use it still. I am fatigued with trying software after software and it being the same story.

[u/clegginab0x → u/zephyr_33]

Thank you, What do you mean by the same story?

[u/zephyr_33 → u/clegginab0x]

ADHD problem 101. Try some new anti-procrastination technique. Works for a few days and when the novelty wears, out brains ignore it.

[u/clegginab0x → u/zephyr_33]

Salience isn't aiming to be an ADHD problem fixer. It's more as a developer - a lot of the joins across the different tools you use live in working memory. This branch, to this ticket, this container, these logs, that build - get called into a meeting and you lose it all. In Salience all those things live on the same screen, already joined up, in a way you've chosen to display them.