micasa is a terminal UI that helps you track home stuff, in a single SQLite file. No cloud, no account, no subscription. Backup with cp.
I built it because I was tired of losing track of everything in notes apps, and "I'll remember that"s. When do I need to clean the dishwasher filter? What's the best quote for a complete overhaul of the backyard. Oops, found some mold behind the trim, need to address that ASAP. That sort of stuff.
Another reason I made micasa was to build a (hopefully useful) low-stakes personal project where the code was written entirely by AI. I still review the code and click the merge button, but 99% of the programming was done with an agent.
Here are some things I think make it worth checking out:
- Vim-style modal UI. Nav mode to browse, edit mode to change. Multicolumn sort, fuzzy-jump to columns, pin-and-filter rows, hide columns you don't need, drill into related records (like quotes for a project). Much of the spirit of the design and some of the actual design choices is and are inspired by VisiData. You should check that out too. - Local LLM chat. Definitely a gimmick, but I am trying preempt "Yeah, but does it AI?"-style conversations. This is an optional feature and you can simply pretend it doesn't exist. All features work without it. - Single-file SQLite-based architecture. Document attachments (manuals, receipts, photos) are stored as BLOBs in the same SQLite database. One file is the whole app state. If you think this won't scale, you're right. It's pretty damn easy to work with though. - Pure Go, zero CGO. Built on Charmbracelet for the TUI and GORM + go-sqlite for the database. Charm makes pretty nice TUIs, and this was my first time using it.
Try it with sample data: go install github.com/cpcloud/micasa/cmd/micasa@latest && micasa --demo
If you're insane you can also run micasa --demo --years 1000 to generate 1000 years worth of demo data. Not sure what house would last that long, but hey, you do you.
files are stored as BLOBs inside the SQLite database, so cp micasa.db backup.db backs up everything – no sidecar files
Heck yeah! Love the VisiData shoutout. Echoing other people's desire for a web UI, mostly so I don't have to be the sole Maintainer of the Truth as the only resident household technomancer.
EDIT: alternatively, exposing the data/functionality via MCP or similar would allow me to connect this to an agent using Home Assistant Voice, so anybody in the house could ask for changes or add new information.
This is super interesting. I do have a GitHub issue for LLM-powered data entry: "Add a landscaping project to do the backyard. Still ideating, thinking a budget of $40k."
I think/hope the whole "home manager" category is going to take off soon.
On a cost basis, it no longer makes sense--practically--not to use visual/text/audio intelligence to manage such a large asset. We just don't have the user-friendly mass-market interfaces for it just yet.
It's possible to scan every manual, every insurance policy, ingest every local bylaw. It's possible to take a video of your home and transform it into a semantically segmented Gsplat of [nearly] everything you own. It's possible to do sensor fusion of all the outward facing cameras from your home. And obviously agents like OpenClaw can decide what to do with all of this (inventory, security, optimization, etc).
We've been building https://homechart.app for years (without GenAI...) and folks just don't realize that home managers exist as an app. They're too used to single purpose solutions, so they don't think to look for more comprehensive options.
There's also the inherit struggle of being everything for everyone with an app like this, and focusing on features 80% of your users want and leaving the other 20% niche features on the backlog upsets people, mostly the power users.
> It's possible to do sensor fusion of all the outward facing cameras from your home
Is that legal though? I'm guessing it the US it might be, given the amount of cameras of public places you can see in various communities, but wonder how common that is. Where I live (Spain) it's not legal to just stick a camera on your house and record public places, you need to put the camera in a way so you're only filming your private property or similar.
I call this the "Home Resource Planner"
Bricks are there (Home assistant, Frigate, Pihole,...)
Thinking of this it would be amazing to have a TUI for home assistant. It's already so good at doing all the nuts and bolts of control and interacting with everything. But its UI is super heavy loaded JavaScript. It doesn't run well on old tablets either for this reason, sadly.
My overall philosophy for (my quite extensive) Home Assistant setup is “amy time a human interacts with the HA UI in any way whatsoever, that is a failure.” I don’t want dashboards, I don’t want a user interface at ALL other than for setting up new automation. The point of HA for me is the house should feel like the correct things happen by magic (and should be essentially unobtrusive and natural).
I've honestly never explored HA. Is there a world where HA obviates micasa. That seems like a win, at least in terms of not having yet another piece of software duplicating an existing thing.
There's a CLI [1], LLM API [2], and REST API [3].
[1]: https://github.com/home-assistant-ecosystem/home-assistant-c...
I would love to have a TUI for Home Assistant!
Wow! This is so cool. I really need to get my hands on TUI. It seems to be a growing trend. Maybe it's a stupid question, because I know about family members that have never opened a terminal - can a TUI app bundled with an icon to simply click and start it?
> can a TUI app bundled with an icon to simply click and start it?
Almost certainly. I personally don't use clicky things to the extent that I am able to avoid them, so I can't describe the specific mechanism or name any of the nouns/tools involved, but I'm pretty sure this exists.
This looks awesome but I think I might still prefer to have an agent make these changes. Not sure though.
In general, I love the juxtaposition of the most advanced computer technology ever (AI) causing an explosion in one of the OLDEST computer technology we've ever had (terminals).
I spend most of my day in a terminal now. It's just funny.
> This looks awesome but I think I might still prefer to have an agent make these changes. Not sure though.
Not entirely sure what you mean here, but the next big feature for micasa is an autopopulation pipeline. Upload a quote PDF and populate the project, quote, and vendor tables. It might not be viable ultimately, but I would love to see how far I can get.
Overkill? Definitely.
I created a basic site to do some similar things as well: https://homemaintlist.com/
Need to revisit it and update it based on a lot of feedback I've received.
I definitely waffled a bit on multi-property support, but decided against it for initial launch. Multi-property avid terminal users seems even more niche!
This looks so much better than most project/product management tools out there.
In my wildest dreams, your project would turn into a jira that devs love.
This is basically what I want, but with a UI that non-techie spouse wouldn’t mind using.
We use Apple Reminders for grocery lists and Paprika for recipes, but something a little more organized than just a shared note for these sorts of things would be great.
I will probably check it out for myself though.
Looks nice, I like this TUI aesthetic, but I’m not sure I could use it on a daily basis. A self-hosted app or phone app might be more convenient
100% on the phone app. Maybe the web app is the phone app? Dunno. Being able to enter information as close to receiving as possible seems key actually. I'll probably poke on this soon.
Why not keep everything in a simple text file?
I'm not sure if you're asking whether micasa should use a text file as its format, or if you're suggesting that a text file can be a substitute for micasa.
The latter.
I do things in my house too infrequently that I don't want to have to re-learn the UI of a tool again and again.
But maybe I'm not the target audience.
Looks good - I like the TUI a lot. The only thing with that type of interface is that there is no chance my wife would use it via the terminal. It would be cool if there was a web UI as well - so other members of the household could access and use it.
Pretty slick! And I really enjoyed the interactive, destructible house at the top :-)
Looks really cool. Agree on comments related to TUI. Maybe a simple interface running locally would be better.
> Not sure what house would last that long
Not necessarily houses, but there are some old buildings around almost everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_extant_building...
Any ideas why Claude forces TUI application development?
It's pretty good at building TUIs. Although it's not bad at Swift/macOS either. But really I think the problem is that we don't have a great solution right now for cross platform native UIs that isn't a WebView (or entire Chrome browser), which doesn't feel very native. But every platform has a pretty good terminal now, even Windows.
Maybe it's that TUIs feel manageable with an agent. They can be well scoped without a ton of effort, which at least for me makes me a tiny bit more comfortable letting them write code.
It feels like something to do with front-end development limitations. I noticed a wave of TUI applications, all written by Claude from the initial commit.
That is a beautiful TUI!
You can also run directly:
go run github.com/cpcloud/micasa/cmd/micasa@latest
This is looking pretty good. Going to run some sample data runs + might try this out.
Your quotes are great.
The testimonials cracked me up. I'm still managing my house maintenance on a spreadsheet like an absolute barbarian. I mean I was, until now. Does it come in Catpuccin?
I hadn't considered theming it differently, though in theory it should be adaptive to light versus dark terminals. I only use dark terminals and I couldn't be bothered to test that before there were any users, so if it doesn't work, I will happily task it out to an agent!
Now I kind of want custom themes...
One of my first thoughts after getting a working prototype was: "Doesn't the car battery need to be replaced?"
So, yeah. This would obviously be called micarro.