Sticky BrainWhy it exists
Most task apps want to be the center of your life. They want your notes moved in, your mail forwarded, your calendar synced, and an account to hold it all. The result is a second brain that doesn't know anything your first brain knows.
Sticky Brain takes the opposite bet. Your notes already live in a vault. Your commitments already live in your mail. The board shouldn't own any of that — it should be able to look at it, pull the relevant bits onto a sticky note, and get out of the way.
So a note on the board is paper: it leans, it curls, it collapses to a title and a couple of badges. Behind it is the only feature that matters — a single Enrich button that searches what you've connected and proposes, never imposes.
Claude output is never applied silently. Findings are proposals. Accepting one is the only thing that changes a card.
Principles
One button.
A note has exactly one content action. Every new capability becomes a new kind of recommendation in the same accept/decline list — never a second button, never a menu.
Read before you write. Refuse on doubt.
Every write to your vault re-reads the file and compares it to what was last written. Mismatch means refuse and flag. Nothing is ever deleted; mass changes trip a circuit breaker.
Optional means optional.
The board works with nothing connected. Each connection — vault, Claude, Outlook — degrades on its own and shows an honest "not connected" state rather than hiding.
Local by construction, not by policy.
There is no Sticky Brain server to be private about. The board is a file, Claude is the CLI you already have, and Outlook is read on this Mac over AppleScript.
The model can only propose what exists.
Every id Claude returns is re-validated against real data. An invented path, a column that doesn't exist, a date that doesn't parse — dropped before it reaches you.
Accessible isn't a feature.
Fully keyboard-operable. One focus ring, never suppressed. Text on note paper held above AA in every palette. Motion honors the OS.
Who makes it
Chris Tarabochia
Builder of small, opinionated tools. Sticky Brain is one of a handful of projects that share a single Obsidian vault as their memory — the board is what it looks like when that vault meets a kanban.
If Sticky Brain does something wrong — or refuses to do something it should — the fastest way to reach me is email.
How it's built
Electron and React, TypeScript throughout. Drag and drop via dnd-kit; motion via framer-motion; state in a single store so every mutation persists automatically. Claude is reached through the claude CLI (or the Anthropic SDK as a fallback). The markdown renderer is hand-rolled and emits React nodes — there is no raw-HTML path anywhere in the app.
Appearance is two CSS axes: palette blocks own color and nothing else; feel blocks own radii, spacing, tilt, borders, shadow and type scale. This site reuses the app's palette variables directly — the four dots in the header are the same four themes.
Status
Sticky Brain is in active development and used daily by its author. The board, themes, markdown notes, vault sync and Enrich are complete. The Outlook path is built and read-only. A signed release build is on the list; for now it's a local build — see Install.
Colophon
Set in the system font on every platform, with Iowan Old Style and Palatino for display in the Natural and Magical palettes — the same choice the app makes. Note colors are butter, rose, mint, sky, lilac and sand, each re-mixed per palette. The red dot on a note in Magical is wax.