Why I built Tempo (the 1am retry-spiral story)

A few months ago I was 40 minutes into a retry spiral on a bug that turned out to be three lines. Not because the bug was hard — because it was 1am, I'd been at it for six hours straight, and I genuinely could not tell anymore that the thing that was broken was me, not the code.

I built Tempo for that specific moment. It's a free, local-first companion that reads the shape of your Claude session — retry loops, hours logged, that particular late-night urgency — and never the content of your prompts, code, or files. When the pattern says you've checked out, it offers exactly one thing: a 40-second reset, at a natural pause, never mid-task. Max two offers a day.

No account, no telemetry, no network calls anywhere in the codebase — I wanted something I'd actually trust to run in the background of my own work, so that's the bar it had to clear before anyone else saw it.

Curious whether other people building with Claude for long stretches hit the same wall, or if this is a me-problem. Launching properly on the 10th — this forum's open now if anyone wants to poke at it before then.