Ryan Choi

Hey folks following along here. Thanks for sticking around before there's even a live link to hand you. Starting today I want to use this space differently: instead of build logs, I'll walk through one thing Retic actually does, one post at a time.

First one: how a goal's progress adds up from whatever's actually happening underneath it, whether that's a one-off task or a daily habit.

Another quick one from building Retic solo (posted here before if you want the backstory). This time it's about habits you're trying to stop doing.

Most habit trackers assume every habit is something you actively perform: meditate, walk, drink water. But "no late-night snacking" or "quit smoking" work backwards. You succeed by doing nothing, and there's no natural moment in your day to open an app and log that nothing happened.

I have a full-time job and two kids under six. Most of my coding on Retic, a goal and habit tracker, happens through AI agents (mostly Claude Code) after both kids are finally asleep, in whatever's left of the night before I fall asleep too. Some nights that's ninety minutes. Some nights it's fifteen.

This isn't a Retic problem. Anyone whose coding sessions get interrupted for days at a stretch runs into the same thing. For me it was never code quality. It was picking a task back up two or three nights later and having no idea what I'd actually decided last time, or what the agent had already tried and dropped.