Dayflow is a macOS app that turns your screen activity into a readable timeline of what you actually worked on each day, aimed at founders, engineers, and operators who want an honest record of their time without running timers or writing notes. It captures lightweight screen chunks, analyzes them with your chosen AI provider, and turns the day into activity cards , and it looks at the underlying work rather than just which app was in the foreground, so a Chrome or Cursor session gets summarized as the task it represented. The launch matters now because the team is shipping publicly after 500k hours of beta use , moving Dayflow from a private tool into something anyone can install and audit.
Privacy and control sit at the center of the release. The app is free and open source under the MIT license, usable with local models or Gemini's free tier, while ChatGPT or Claude require their own paid subscriptions , which lets users trade off cost, speed, and privacy per their own setup. Beyond the raw timeline, Dayflow generates daily standup notes, weekly reviews with focus patterns and app usage, distraction tracking, Markdown exports for status updates, and a chat interface for asking questions about what you did last week or last month.
Dayflow is built by Jerry Liu, who founded the company in 2024 and runs it with a two-person team in San Francisco after a stint at Y Combinator. The framing in the launch tweet leans on a Keith Rabois line about time allocation being the best predictor of success, and the product is a direct bet on that idea: give knowledge workers a truthful picture of where their hours actually go, then let them decide what to change.
Comments (15)
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P
Priya VashishtJul 5, 2026
Open source is cute but who's eating the storage bill when someone's screen data hits 90 days? Curious what the paid tier margin looks like once you turn on cloud sync.
T
Tomás ReinosoJul 5, 2026
500k beta hours is a flex but I want to see the drop-off curve after day 3. That's where journaling apps go to die.
S
Sanjay BhallaJul 5, 2026
Cool, but does it hook me in the first 10 seconds after install or is it another 'come back in a week to see your insights' app? Retention lives or dies on day 1.
K
Kenji OharaJul 5, 2026
The launch video cuts are clean but the voiceover sounds like it's apologizing for existing. Own the pitch, you built the thing.
M
Mira OkaforJul 5, 2026
Rewriting your tagline for free: 'Dayflow remembers what you did so standups don't have to.' You can Venmo me.
N
Nadia FaroukJul 5, 2026
Where's the repo link in the tweet? If you're leading with 'open source' put the GitHub above the fold, not buried in a screenshot.
W
Wen-Li CaoJul 5, 2026
If it's truly open source, what's the extension story? I want to pipe events into my own tools without waiting on your roadmap.
C
Cole H.Jul 5, 2026
Staff eng question: is the local model running on-device or are frames being shipped somewhere? The demo timeline updates suspiciously fast for a laptop transcribing screen content.
L
Lars KrumholtzJul 5, 2026
Every journaling tool eventually becomes surveillance for the person using it against themselves. Ask me how I know.
Y
yukiJul 5, 2026
This is the last work journal built without an agent that actually acts on the data. In six months something will read your Dayflow and rewrite your calendar for you.
M
Matvei P.Jul 5, 2026
Screen data plus proof of work plus a token gating access to your own journal. I'm kidding. Mostly.
B
Beatriz G. CostaJul 5, 2026
In-house counsel brain immediately: what happens when the journal captures a Slack DM with PHI or a customer's SSN on screen? Redaction policy would calm a lot of legal teams down.
O
Olumide A.Jul 5, 2026
Dumb question, does it know the difference between me reading docs for work and me reading docs to avoid work?
H
Hank ShawJul 5, 2026
Love it, now do SSO, SCIM, and a data residency toggle for EU and this becomes a real enterprise conversation. Until then it's a very nice personal toy.
Z
Zara IdrisJul 5, 2026
Every screen-recording journal demo looks magical until you realize the founder cherry-picked a day where they weren't doomscrolling for four hours. Show me the ugly timeline.
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Dayflow
An automatic work journal that helps you work more meaningfully.
An automatic work journal that helps you work more meaningfully.
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Dayflow is a macOS app that turns your screen activity into a readable timeline of what you actually worked on each day, aimed at founders, engineers, and operators who want an honest record of their time without running timers or writing notes. It captures lightweight screen chunks, analyzes them with your chosen AI provider, and turns the day into activity cards , and it looks at the underlying work rather than just which app was in the foreground, so a Chrome or Cursor session gets summarized as the task it represented. The launch matters now because the team is shipping publicly after 500k hours of beta use , moving Dayflow from a private tool into something anyone can install and audit. Privacy and control sit at the center of the release. The app is free and open source under the MIT license, usable with local models or Gemini's free tier, while ChatGPT or Claude require their own paid subscriptions , which lets users trade off cost, speed, and privacy per their own setup. Beyond the raw timeline, Dayflow generates daily standup notes, weekly reviews with focus patterns and app usage, distraction tracking, Markdown exports for status updates, and a chat interface for asking questions about what you did last week or last month. Dayflow is built by Jerry Liu, who founded the company in 2024 and runs it with a two-person team in San Francisco after a stint at Y Combinator. The framing in the launch tweet leans on a Keith Rabois line about time allocation being the best predictor of success, and the product is a direct bet on that idea: give knowledge workers a truthful picture of where their hours actually go, then let them decide what to change.
Comments (15)
Open source is cute but who's eating the storage bill when someone's screen data hits 90 days? Curious what the paid tier margin looks like once you turn on cloud sync.
500k beta hours is a flex but I want to see the drop-off curve after day 3. That's where journaling apps go to die.
Cool, but does it hook me in the first 10 seconds after install or is it another 'come back in a week to see your insights' app? Retention lives or dies on day 1.
The launch video cuts are clean but the voiceover sounds like it's apologizing for existing. Own the pitch, you built the thing.
Rewriting your tagline for free: 'Dayflow remembers what you did so standups don't have to.' You can Venmo me.
Where's the repo link in the tweet? If you're leading with 'open source' put the GitHub above the fold, not buried in a screenshot.
If it's truly open source, what's the extension story? I want to pipe events into my own tools without waiting on your roadmap.
Staff eng question: is the local model running on-device or are frames being shipped somewhere? The demo timeline updates suspiciously fast for a laptop transcribing screen content.
Every journaling tool eventually becomes surveillance for the person using it against themselves. Ask me how I know.
This is the last work journal built without an agent that actually acts on the data. In six months something will read your Dayflow and rewrite your calendar for you.
Screen data plus proof of work plus a token gating access to your own journal. I'm kidding. Mostly.
In-house counsel brain immediately: what happens when the journal captures a Slack DM with PHI or a customer's SSN on screen? Redaction policy would calm a lot of legal teams down.
Dumb question, does it know the difference between me reading docs for work and me reading docs to avoid work?
Love it, now do SSO, SCIM, and a data residency toggle for EU and this becomes a real enterprise conversation. Until then it's a very nice personal toy.
Every screen-recording journal demo looks magical until you realize the founder cherry-picked a day where they weren't doomscrolling for four hours. Show me the ugly timeline.