A small web app for the moment when your head is too full to start. You write down everything bouncing around — tasks, worries, half-ideas — and it hands back a single, concrete action you can start right now. Built and deployed in a day.
Most productivity tools ask you to organize when what you actually need is permission to stop organizing. Braindump is the smallest app I could imagine that does the opposite: one text box, one button, one answer. I built it in a day to have it for myself, and to practice shipping the whole loop — frontend, auth, model, deploy — on a stack I'd never used together.
You land, you dump, you get one thing. That's the full loop — no dashboard, no history, no settings. Here's what each step does before we zoom in on the screens.
These are rebuilt in HTML using the same colors and type as the shipped product — not screenshots. I'll explain what each screen is doing and the one or two design choices that matter on it.
A visitor's first ten seconds with the app. One sentence, one button. A dark cocoa background makes it feel like a quiet room rather than a cheerful productivity tool — nobody shows up here when they're calm.
The main choice. No screenshots or feature bullets. If the sentence “unload your mind, start one thing” doesn't explain it, adding more copy won't either.
The prompt is a question: “What's in your head right now?”. You type whatever comes out — tasks, feelings, distractions — all in one paragraph. The button says Unload, not Submit.
The main choice. No formatting, no tags, no minimum length, no character counter. Every widget I didn't add is one less thing to think about while trying to think less.
Honestly I've been avoiding the hard stuff and just doing easy busywork. The video is the thing that actually matters but I keep finding excuses. Maybe I should just watch some tutorials first? No that's just more procrastination. Also need to call mom back and figure out what's happening with the car insurance renewal.
Just feeling scattered today. Too many tabs open in my brain.
Top: a single italic sentence naming the pattern in the dump — not advice, just observation. Middle: the bordered card holding the one thing — verb-first, startable in five minutes. Bottom: a quiet shadow list of the other stuff so it doesn't feel lost.
How it decides. The dump gets sent to a language model with a strict set of rules: pick exactly one action, make it startable immediately, phrase it as a commitment, never a suggestion. The instructions to the model are more carefully written than anything else in the product.
There's no clever architecture here. The goal was practice — running the whole loop from login to deploy using pieces I hadn't used together before. Each piece below does one job.
The real takeaway. The unglamorous plumbing — login redirect URLs, environment variables across local and production, not running up a model bill — took more hours than the product itself. That was the point. The next time I ship something on this stack it'll be faster, because I know where the sharp edges are.
This is a weekend experiment that happens to run in production, not a product with a growth curve. It works for me when my head is full. A few friends have the link bookmarked. That's the full scoreboard.
What I took away: the boring middle of shipping — auth, hosting, billing, deploy — is the part that slows you down the first time you touch a new stack. Getting through it once on a throwaway project means the next real thing I build on Next.js and Supabase won't cost a weekend of setup.
What was hard. Not the code. The editorial voice. How confident should the app sound when it picks your one thing? If the pick is wrong, does it apologize or stand behind it? Braindump lives between a coach and a task runner — too much of either and it breaks. Writing the instructions to the model was the product design.