The idea
A menu-bar / system-tray application that monitors a configurable list of local Git repositories. Every Friday (or on demand) it generates a concise activity digest — what branches you touched, which commits landed, roughly how many lines changed — and formats it for pasting into a Slack standup, a weekly email, or a timesheet.
Why build this
Developers keep detailed records of their work without realizing it: every commit is a timestamped log entry. But extracting a coherent "what I did this week" from raw git log output is tedious, and most people either skip the standup, write it from memory, or ask an AI to summarize a wall of diff. A lightweight native app that does this automatically, watching local disk without any cloud sync, fits into the "quiet tool that just works" niche.
The blocker for most developers is not skill — it is friction. A tray icon that pops up Friday at 4 PM with a pre-filled summary removes that friction entirely.
Stack sketch
- Electron (cross-platform, ships a native tray icon, can shell out to
git) - simple-git (Node.js wrapper around
gitCLI) for log parsing - Handlebars or plain string templates for digest formatting
- node-cron for the scheduled Friday trigger
- electron-store for persisting repo list and preferences locally
- Optional: Ollama via HTTP to rephrase raw commit messages into plain English before presenting them
Scope for v1
- Add/remove repos via a settings panel (just folder paths)
- Parse
git log --since=last-monday --until=now --author=$(git config user.email)per repo - Group commits by repo and by day
- Output plain text (copy-to-clipboard button) and Markdown
- Manual "generate now" button plus weekly cron trigger
- Out of scope for v1: cloud sync, team aggregation, calendar integration, GitHub/GitLab API pull
Where it could go
The most natural follow-on is pulling in GitHub or GitLab activity to cover PRs reviewed, issues closed, and code review comments left — work that produces no local commits. That turns the tool into a fuller developer journal, not just a commit aggregator.
A second expansion is team mode: a lightweight server that collects digests from multiple engineers and produces a team rollup. This edges toward replacing lightweight project-management status meetings entirely, which is a credible B2B angle for small agencies that bill by the hour and need traceable time records.
Watch out for
Monorepos and repos with hundreds of commits per day will generate noisy digests; you need sensible truncation and filtering defaults early or the output becomes useless before it becomes useful. Also, the Electron bundle size (~120 MB) will annoy users who expect a "lightweight" tool — offering a plain CLI with a cron entry as an alternative is worth doing in parallel.