We were featured three times in the Product Hunt newsletter, including once before our launch day had even ended.

Meridian finished as the #1 Product of the Day, and we are now aiming for the top of the August monthly leaderboard.

Meridian is an open-source, MIT-licensed, local-first AI work journal built to ensure meaningful work does not go unnoticed. It runs on your device, captures real work activity, organizes it into a clear timeline, connects it with GitHub and Jira, and drafts worklogs and project updates for review and approval.

We want to make work more visible without turning productivity software into surveillance. Meridian keeps the underlying context on the user s device, gives them control over what gets shared, and remains open source so anyone can inspect how it works.

Hot take: most developer time trackers are basically surveillance software with a productivity logo slapped on top.

Random screenshots. Keyboard activity. Idle timers. Productivity scores.

And somehow we're supposed to believe that's helping developers do better work?

Fifteen people. Fifteen minutes. Roughly ninety seconds of information.

The format's failure is structural, not cultural. You're asked what you did yesterday at the exact moment you're least able to answer before coffee, from memory, in front of an audience. So everyone reports the ticket they had open, because that's the retrievable answer. The actual texture of the day, the part where you'd learn something about how the sprint is really going, is gone.

The thing that's worked better for us: declaring intent in the morning instead of reporting history. "Here's what I'm picking up today" takes ten seconds, is answerable without memory, and produces something you can compare against reality at 6pm. Plan versus done, written down, no meeting.

Where it falls apart is that plan-versus-done is only useful if nobody's judged on the gap, the moment it becomes a scorecard, everyone starts declaring safe plans.

The version of this story that gets told on launch day is the highlight reel. Here's the actual accounting.

What we gave up: two senior salaries in Bengaluru, one of which came with a team of 25 and a title that took two years to earn.

What we have built since: 500 users, 220 GitHub stars, one #1 Product of the Day, zero revenue.

That last number is the one that matters and it's the one nobody puts in the launch post. We are three months in with a product people install and no evidence yet that anyone will pay for it. That's not a failure, it's just the honest position, and pretending otherwise would make the next part of this useless.

For me, it is the discovery. I regularly find new products, see how founders present their ideas, and learn from the conversations around each launch.

Launching Meridian made the platform even more meaningful to me. Meridian finished as the #1 Product of the Day, and the support from the community made all the work behind it worthwhile.

Meridian was created to help developers capture their work automatically and make sure their contributions do not go unnoticed. It is open source, so anyone can explore the project, contribute, or follow its progress.

What keeps you coming back to Product Hunt?

Most engineering processes were designed around a simple loop: a developer picks up a ticket, writes code, opens a pull request, and moves on. That assumption is breaking. An engineer can now orchestrate multiple AI agents, generate several implementations, discard most of them, review hundreds of lines of code, run experiments, and spend their time deciding what should exist rather than typing it.

I saw this shift while building AI-native systems for enterprises at 4good AI and leading a team of developers. The bottleneck is moving from producing code to directing, validating and integrating it.

I learned that as software gets easier to build, coordination becomes the bottleneck.

At my previous work, I repeatedly watched our projects miss deadlines, cut corners in the SDLC, and eventually get rebuilt - not because engineers couldn t build them, but because teams discovered too late that reality had diverged from the plan.

I also noticed smaller teams consistently moved faster. Not necessarily because they had better engineers, but because context travelled faster: everyone knew what changed, what was blocked, what had been tried, and why.

After years building AI-native systems for enterprises and leading engineers, I ve seen the same pattern repeatedly: engineering slows down when context gets fragmented and feedback arrives late.

Meridian is an open-source, MIT-licensed, local-first AI work journal. It runs on your device, captures work that often gets forgotten, and drafts clear worklogs and project updates for you to review and approve.

If you believe productivity tools should help people make their work visible without becoming surveillance software, please support Meridian on Product Hunt. We would also value your honest feedback on what works, what feels unclear, and what we should build next.

Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/prod...

GitHub: https://github.com/Meridiona/mer...

Meridian is an open-source, MIT-licensed, local-first AI work journal. It runs on your device, captures work that often gets forgotten, and drafts clear worklogs and project updates for you to review and approve.

If you believe productivity tools should help people make their work visible without becoming surveillance software, please support Meridian on Product Hunt. We would also value your honest feedback on what works, what feels unclear, and what we should build next.

Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/prod...

GitHub: https://github.com/Meridiona/mer...
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