Build your own Things 3 with Claude Code
A beautifully designed personal task manager: inbox, Today, Upcoming and Someday, projects with headings, areas of responsibility and more.
The Claude Code prompt
Build my own take on Things 3: a beautifully designed personal task manager. Give it an original name, logo, colours and copy, and do not use Things 3's name, branding or assets. Version one should have: - Inbox, Today, Upcoming and Someday - Projects with headings - Areas of responsibility - Quick entry - Evening section The hard part: Craft. The bar is polish, so spend your time on interactions and animation. How to build it: 1. Read this folder first. If it is empty, set up Next.js (App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind) with Postgres through Prisma or Supabase, and Supabase Auth or Auth.js for sign-in. Write a short PLAN.md with the data model, screens, third-party services and what you are leaving out of version one. 2. Build the core loop end to end before anything else: inbox, Today, Upcoming and Someday, working with real data saved to the database. 3. Add the rest of the features one at a time, and seed realistic demo data so every screen looks alive. 4. Keep API keys in environment variables, and put any paid service behind a small interface with a local stub, so the app runs on a fresh machine without accounts. 5. Run it, click through every screen on desktop and mobile widths, fix what breaks, and finish with a summary of what works, what is stubbed and how to deploy it.
Paste it into Claude Code in an empty folder. It plans first, so read PLAN.md and steer before it starts building.
Version one
- Inbox, Today, Upcoming and Someday
- Projects with headings
- Areas of responsibility
- Quick entry
- Evening section
The hard part
Craft. The bar is polish, so spend your time on interactions and animation.
Make it yours: a niche Things 3 ignores, an original name and brand, and one feature it does badly done well.
More to build
- Your own Notion
An all-in-one docs and wiki workspace: nested pages in a sidebar, block editor with headings, lists, to-dos and code, slash command menu and more.
- Your own Trello
A kanban board for projects: boards with lists and cards, drag and drop between lists, labels, due dates and checklists and more.
- Your own Google Calendar
A calendar app: day, week and month views, create events by dragging, recurring events and more.
- Your own Todoist
A to-do list app: quick add with natural language dates, projects and sections, priorities and labels and more.
- Your own Airtable
A spreadsheet-database hybrid: tables with typed fields, grid, kanban and calendar views, linked records between tables and more.
- Your own Obsidian
A markdown notes app with backlinks: markdown notes in folders, [[Wiki links]] and backlinks, graph view of linked notes and more.