Introducing Flow: now, my whole workflow lives in one place

My work lives in many tools.

Flow is my latest side project: a personal agent that gathers everything I'm responsible for, ranks it, and tells me plainly where to begin. It keeps my projects, today's tasks, the people involved, the files, and my Claude sessions side by side in one window. It's built for people who run several streams of work at once, and are the only ones who can see all of them.

The idea came from a conversation I had with a teammate of mine. The conversation was the kind where you describe your job out loud, and hear it differently. What I kept describing was the cross-functional and highly collaborative nature of my work, though I didn't necessarily see it at the time. I sit between product, design, engineering, and marketing. Because of this, I'm part of a lot of people's work, and a lot of people's work is a part of mine.

It's one of my favorite parts of my job. But it has a cost that nobody puts on a board: the context for any one piece of work is never in one place. The ticket is in Jira. The pull request is in GitHub. The decision was made in a Slack thread. Briefs live in a Google Drive folder. The reason behind the brief was said out loud in a meeting Granola wrote down. Every morning I open all five, and every morning I rebuilt the same picture in my head before I could do anything with it.

None of those tools are wrong. Each one is the right home for its kind of thing. But the problem is that each team's tool is shaped around that team's view of the work, and my view cuts between all of them. No one else looks at the whole slate, and no tool was built to show it to me.

Flow is an agent first and an app second. The agent does the reading, and the app is where it hands me the result. What it really does is context orchestration: it pulls the pieces of my work out of the places they live and puts them back together around the thing I'm responsible for.

Right now, Flow runs twice a day. Flow reads Slack, Jira, GitHub, Google Drive and my Granola meeting notes, then re-ranks everything. Each project gets a heat score based on what changed, who is waiting, and what's due. The project that needs me goes to the top. Under it sits a short list of today's tasks across every project, each with a line saying why it's there: who asked, when, and what it's blocking, or what's blocking it.

Then it writes a brief. It's a few sentences, in plain language, that tell me where the day starts and why. It reads like a sharp colleague giving the morning rundown, not a dashboard asking for my attention. If a gather fails, the brief says so. If the data is stale, it reads as stale. I'd rather Flow tell me it doesn't know than tell me everything is fine, or nothing at all.

The window has four panels side by side: projects, tasks (split into "today" and "project"), the brief with its people and resources, and my active sessions. That last panel matters more than I expected. A lot of my work happens with agents running in the background, and Flow shows me which ones are working, which are done, and which are waiting on me. To me, a session stuck on a question I didn't answer is just as much a blocker as a ticket in review.

Soon, projects will live in Arcs. An Arc is a parent for projects: the highest level of context in Flow. Think of it as a theme that ties related projects to each other, so the agent knows that a classifier threshold, an onboarding funnel, or a customer escalation are all part of the same story.

I use Flow every day, and I'd put the gain at about 10-15% so far. That's not a number to put on a billboard, but it is growing. 10-15% is my rough estimate from my working days for now, and it's still going up as the agent gets better at reading my sources, and I ship improvements to the agent and the product.

A surprising amount of it comes from finding things, not ranking them. A lot of my time used to go to tracking down a resource I knew existed: the repo someone linked in a thread last week, the design brief from a kickoff, the directive behind a decision, the PRD a teammate shared in passing. Flow files those as it Flows, against the project they belong to. When I open a project, its references are already there. Prior to this, my "quick draw" access to any one of these resources was to Cmd+T and search until I found it. No wonder I have so many tabs open all the time.

The other change is harder to measure. I start the day knowing what matters instead of finding out. The start of the day used to go to rebuilding context, but now it goes to the first real task. Some mornings that's the whole difference between being on top of the work and being behind it.

I built Flow in a week, entirely in code.

It started with a Figma sketch of the home screen with the four panels. Everything after this happened in the product itself. I'd change a panel, use it the next morning against my real work, and keep it or throw it out based on how the morning went. This workflow shaped the product more than any plan has so far, and it's also where Flow's rules came from. At the moment, the product is being defined by what I needed the tool to do before I could trust it with my morning.

The marketing site came the same way, but in the opposite order. I designed it in code first, then I used a paper sketch of the full page to plan ahead. The site borrows the app's own design language: Inter and Fragment Mono, hairline rules instead of cards, a 120 px inset, and one blue accent. In case you were wondering, it's inspired by my portfolio.

At the bottom of the page the site slides away and leaves an illustration behind. It's my favorite part of the site at this moment. A woman paddles her canoe down a blue river at sunrise, with a brown hound sitting in the bow. Loose sheets of paper drift down the current toward her: yellow, pink, pale blue, white. In the stern behind her, the ones she's already picked up sit in a neat stack.

That's the whole product in one image, if I had to put it concisely. The river is everything upstream: the threads, the tickets, the docs, the meeting notes, all flowing toward you whether you're ready or not. The paddler doesn't fight the current and doesn't chase every sheet. She keeps moving and picks up what reaches her, and everything she's gathered while Flowing ends up in her boat. The dog is on lookout, watching downriver for what's coming next. That's the job I wanted an agent to do, and that's why its called Flow, or “workflow”. I just wanted to stay in the flow of things, with Flow.

I also wanted one decorative thing on an otherwise strict, monochrome site, so the style is deliberate. It's drawn after Uber's illustration library: saturated flat colour, and shading stippled in with grain. The illustration keeps its own palette, apart from the water, but the river is the site's accent blue, the same blue that marks Flow in the app. The one thing that ties the scene to the product is the one thing that's moving.

Flow is not publicly available yet; I am still working on Arcs. They will turn Flow from a ranked list of projects into a map of how my work fits together, and they give the agent better context for every gather and brief, because I still want to have control over how things get organized. After that, the work is making Flow smarter. That means being better at deciding what counts as a change, better at filing the resources it finds, and better at saying when it isn't sure.

Right now, Flow is for people whose work belongs to several teams and whose view of it belongs to none: a designer or researcher between product groups, an operations lead, or a product manager who also designs and ships. Every team has a board. You're on all of them, but none is yours. Flow is also for creators, freelancers, and owners, who do a lot on their own.

If that sounds you, I'd love to hear how you start your day. Learn more about Flow here.