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JerryZLiu
Dayflow
Swift2025–2025
JerryZLiu / Dayflow

Dayflow

The automatic work journal/time tracker. Privately turns your screen into a timeline of what you actually accomplished. Open-source and local-first.

3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The automatic work journal/time tracker. Privately turns your screen into a timeline of what you actually accomplished. Open-source and local-first.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by week3 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2025-09-24 14:53:57 UTC to 2025-10-27 09:12:55 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.

0122025-09-22 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-09-29 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 commentsSep 222025-09-29 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-10-06 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-10-06 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-10-13 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsOct 62025-10-13 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-10-20 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-10-20 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-10-27 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-10-27 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-11-03 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsOct 27

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Sep 222025-09-22 00:00:00 UTC2025-09-29 00:00:00 UTC211
Sep 292025-09-29 00:00:00 UTC2025-10-06 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 62025-10-06 00:00:00 UTC2025-10-13 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 132025-10-13 00:00:00 UTC2025-10-20 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 202025-10-20 00:00:00 UTC2025-10-27 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 272025-10-27 00:00:00 UTC2025-11-03 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

3 sources

Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day

Hi HN! I've been building Dayflow, a macOS app that automatically tracks what you're actually working on (not just which apps you have open). Here's what it does: - It creates a semantic timeline of your day; - It does it by understanding the content on your screen (with local or cloud VLMs); - This allows you to see exactly where your time went without any manual logging. Traditional time trackers tell you "3 hours in Chrome" which is not very helpful. Dayflow actually understands if you're reading documentation, debugging code, or scrolling HN. Instead of "Chrome: 3 hours", you get "Reviewed PR comments: 45min", "Read HN thread about Rust: 20min", "Debugged auth flow: 1.5hr". I was an early Rewind user but rarely used the retrieval feature. I built Dayflow because I saw other interesting uses for screen data. I find that it helps me sta
Read the rest
y on track while working - I check it every few hours and make sure I’m spending my time the way I intended - if I’m not, I try to course correct. Here’s what you need to know about privacy: - Run 100% locally using qwen2.5-vl-3b (~4GB model) - No cloud uploads, no account - Full source available under MIT license (https://github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayflow) - Optional: BYO Gemini API key for better quality (stored in Keychain, with free-tier workaround to prevent training on your data) The tech stack is pretty simple, SwiftUI with a local sqlite DB. Uses native macOS apis for efficient screen captures. Since most people who run LLMs locally already have their tool of choice (Ollama, LLMStudio, etc.), I decided to not embed an LLM into Dayflow. By far the biggest challenge was adapting from SOTA vision models like Gemini 2.5 Pro to small, local models. My constraints were that it had to take up <4GB of ram and have vision capabilities. I had to do a lot of evals to figure out that Qwen2.5VL-3B was the best balance of size and quality, but there was still a sizable tradeoff in quality that I had to accept. I also got creative with sampling rates and prompt chunking to deal with the 100x smaller context window. Processing a 15 minute segment takes ~32 local LLM calls vs 2 Gemini calls! Here’s what I’m working on next: Distillation: Using Gemini's high-quality outputs as training data to teach a local model the patterns it needs, hopefully closing the quality gap. Custom dashboards where you can track answers to any question like "How long did I spend on HN?" or "Hours until my first deep work session of the day I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially if you've struggled with productivity tracking or have ideas for what you'd want from a tool like this.
480 points · Open discussion

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