Arsalan Amin

A useful worklog should not just sound polished. It should be grounded in evidence from the actual workday.

Meridian runs locally, builds a timeline from your development activity, matches that context to open Jira and GitHub tickets, and drafts updates for you to review before anything is shared.

We re launching today and would especially value feedback on:

I've just made my free tier worse for a group of people who did nothing wrong, and I can't work out what I owe them.

Background, anonymised as best I can. Until this week you could use the core function of the thing I build without an account at all turn up, get a result, look at it. You only had to identify yourself if you wanted to keep the output. This week I put a free account in front of it. Same allowance, same features, no card, but you now sign up before you get anything.

The reasons were dull and real. I couldn't attribute anything to anyone. I couldn't tell a returning person from a new one, so I had no idea whether people were coming back. And an anonymous endpoint that costs me money on every call was an abuse problem I was going to have to solve eventually regardless.

What I didn't think through is what to say about it. Three things I'm stuck on:

People keep losing work, and I can't tell any more whether the thing I built to protect them is just annoying them.

Background: the thing I work on generates a file for you in the browser. For a long time I stored nothing at all the input was discarded the second the output existed, and the output only lived in the tab you made it in. Two reasons. The storage bill for something people mostly make once and throw away looked bad at any real volume, and I liked being able to say plainly that nothing a user gave me sat on a server after they left.

What actually happened is that people would make something they were happy with, get distracted, close the tab, and lose it. No undo. Every email I got about it was some version of "can you get it back", and the answer was no there had never been anything to get back.

So I've just moved to a short retention window: the output is held long enough to hand to you and then deleted automatically within 24 hours. It fixes the complaint. But it's left me with three things I didn't expect: