Ariadne

Ariadne is a personal project management tool for people with too many things going on. The project plan is in one place, the follow-up is buried in Slack, and your boss would like a report on what you did last week. I built Ariadne to help keep track of all of it. The name comes from the princess who gave Theseus a thread to find his way out of the Labyrinth. It seemed appropriate.

The command center gives you somewhere to start the day: what’s overdue, due today, coming up, or blocked. Projects keep the work connected, with dependency graphs to show what’s waiting on what and collaborators to keep track of who’s involved. When you’re ready to head out, you can push the day’s agenda to Todoist and take it with you.

Keeping external systems up to date is, of course, another task. Ariadne’s local MCP server lets you hand some of that work to an AI agent. Ask it to generate a report of what’s overdue, what needs to happen next, or ask it to pull together the week’s progress for a report. The agent can work directly with your project information, so you don’t have to keep copying it into a chat and then copying the results back.

For work that arrives in less orderly form, AI Import extracts tasks from emails, project plans, Slack notifications, and whatever other text you throw at it. That gives the “can you also…” at the bottom of an email somewhere to go.

People have their own records, with reporting lines and contact information for when you need to chase something down. Tags work across the workspace, and you can rename or merge them as you figure out what you actually want to call things. Reports come out as plain text you can paste into an email, because communicating the work shouldn’t require giving everyone another app to log into.

Everything lives on your own filesystem: human-readable JSON for the data, ordinary files for attachments. There’s no account to create, no hosted server to depend on, and no database to maintain. The core application keeps working without a network connection. And if Ariadne disappeared tomorrow, your projects would still open in a text editor and your attachments would still be sitting in their folder.