Flow is a zero-dependency AI-powered CLI that becomes your intelligent coding companion. It captures your thoughts, answers questions about your own code, and helps you never lose track of solutions you've already found.

The Problem We Lived Every Day Every developer has had this moment: "I know I solved this exact problem 3 months ago... but where?" You've spent hours re-researching something you already figured out. Your Slack messages are buried, your code comments are scattered, and your brilliant solutions are lost in the noise. We were tired of being our own worst enemy - constantly re-solving problems we'd already conquered. Notion/Obsidian? Too heavy, requires context switching, dies without internet GitHub Issues? Tied to repos, not personal workflow, too formal Slack/Discord? Messages get buried, no search across projects Regular notes apps? No code context, no git integration, no AI understanding Companion/other AI tools? Don't know YOUR code, YOUR solutions, YOUR context 1. It Knows YOUR Work Flow isn't trained on the internet - it's trained on YOUR notes, YOUR git history, YOUR solutions. When you ask "How did I handle user authentication?", it searches through your actual code and notes, not Stack Overflow. 2. Zero Friction = Actually Gets Used One command: flow note "thought" No apps to open, no browsers to launch Works in your terminal where you already live Takes 2 seconds, not 2 minutes 3. Context-Aware by Design bashflow note "Fixed memory leak in parser" # Automatically captures: # - Current git branch: feature/parser-optimization # - Current commit: a1b2c3d # - Project path: ~/projects/compiler # - Timestamp: 2024-06-22 14:30 # - Auto-tags: parser, bugfix 4. Actually Portable One Python file No cloud dependencies Your data stays yours Works on any machine with Python No vendor lock-in, ever 5. Grows With You The more you use it, the smarter it gets about YOUR patterns, YOUR projects, YOUR way of thinking. It becomes your external brain, not just another tool. The "Holy Shit" Moment When you first ask Flow a question about code you wrote months ago, and it instantly finds the exact note with the solution - that's magic. That's the moment you realize you'll never lose your own knowledge again. Engineering Excellence Self-contained: Zero external dependencies after Python Resilient: Works offline, degrades gracefully Fast: SQLite + FTS5 makes search instant Thoughtful: Auto-detects AI providers, handles edge cases Hackable: One file you can read, understand, and modify Solving a Real Problem We didn't build this to be clever - we built it because we needed it. Every feature exists because we felt the pain of not having it. The Developer Experience bash Install curl -o flow flow_cli_app.py && chmod +x flow Use immediately flow note "Discovered React useCallback fixes re-renders" Never lose that knowledge again flow ask "React performance optimization" → Shows your note from 6 months ago Personal Knowledge Management is broken for developers. We context-switch between 50 tools, write code in one place, take notes in another, and lose everything in the chaos. Flow fixes this by meeting you where you already work - the terminal - and making knowledge capture so frictionless that you actually do it. Every developer should have their own personal AI that knows their work, their patterns, their solutions. Not OpenAI's knowledge of the internet - YOUR knowledge of YOUR work. Flow is the first step toward that future. A future where you never have to re-solve problems you've already solved, where your experience compounds instead of evaporates. We built Flow because losing your own hard-earned knowledge is the stupidest way to waste time as a developer. And we're proud that we fixed it.

Flow caught my attention as a CLI that promises to be a "daily dev companion" without external dependencies. After using it for a week, I'm genuinely impressed. The setup is refreshingly simple - it auto-detects whether you have Ollama running locally or an OpenAI API key, falling back to built-in pattern matching if neither is available. The git integration is seamless, automatically capturing branch and commit context when you jot down notes. What I love: The flow ask command that searches through your own notes to answer questions like "where did I put that API validation logic?" It's like having a personal Stack Overflow of your own work. The auto-tagging is smart enough to detect languages and technologies from your notes.

This is one of those tools that seems simple but gets the fundamentals right. The author clearly understands developer workflow - it captures git context automatically, has sensible defaults, and doesn't try to do too much.

Flow

The Daily Dev Companion

The Daily Dev Companion