foster.health

Where this is going

A journal should run on your own machine.

What you write here is about as personal as text gets — how you slept, who you called, what you're trying to stop doing. That kind of record shouldn't live on someone else's computer because that was the only option on offer.

Five parts, one loop

Journal

Where you are

You write what happened and how it went. Nothing is required of it — several entries a day or one a week, whatever the rhythm you set.

Habits

What you embody

The steering made concrete. Each one carries a cadence — once, twice, three times a day, a week, a month, a trimester, a semester, a year — so you can see what's holding.

Goals

Where you're going

The part that points forward. Open-ended, or a to-do you tick off — and each one keeps a thread of how it changed shape.

Check-ups

What you make of it

Once a week, five questions with that week's numbers beside them. Where you look at the rest and decide what changes.

Insights

What you don't want to lose

A gratitude, a realization, a lesson, a pattern you noticed. Short, dated, and kept apart from the day's entry so they stay findable.

Works with no AI at all

Reflect answers real questions — how you've been, what you did, how you felt that day — and every one of those answers is arithmetic over rows you wrote. No model sees your entries to produce them. That isn't a limitation to be fixed later; it's the floor everything else stands on.

A platform, not just a page

The intent is to speak MCP, so the journal is something you can talk to from the assistant you already pay for — or from a free account — rather than a place you have to visit. The website and the interface an assistant sees would be the same journal underneath.

Companions you choose

If you do turn AI on, what it's like should be your call — one that simply holds the facts, one that reads you back through Stoicism, one that keeps a record of what went well and tells you so. Different companions over the same journal. On your own compute and your own tokens where you have them.

Where it actually stands

Now
Journal, habits, goals, check-ups, insights
All five work today, including habit cadences, goal threads and the weekly retrospective.
Now
Runs without any AI
Every feature works with no model, no API key, no network call.
Now
Your data stays in one file
One SQLite database. Nothing is exported or sent anywhere.
Now
No third-party requests
Typefaces are served from this app, so reading your journal doesn't ping a CDN.
Planned
MCP interface
Intended, so an assistant can read and write the journal. Not built yet.
Planned
Companions
Intended. Nothing is wired to a model today.
Planned
Open source
Intended. The code isn't public yet.
Planned
One-command self-install
Intended. It's a normal Rails app, so it's buildable, but there's no installer.

Nothing on this page is a promise about a date. It's the direction, and an honest note about which parts of it are real yet.