Eden - a command line journaling application
Tuesday, 6 January 2026I started writing eden—a CLI tool for logging and basic journaling—three years ago, when Go was at 1.17.
I was learning Go, had written a few simple programs, and was hooked on the “notes for thinking” trend from tools like Roam Research and Obsidian.
The idea: command-line only, entries saved to a database (not markdown files) for easy linking and search. I like databases and living in the terminal.
Building it slowly with TDD was fun at first, but I got bored and moved on.
Other interests took over. Two years passed, then a quick commit saying “hello from 2024.”
Claude and friends
Christmas 2025 rolled around, and I still needed this tool.
I’d been trying lots of AI tools and had an expiring Claude subscription. I opened Claude Code in the eden directory, fed it to Opus 4.5, and it took off.
Hitting Opus limits, I switched to GLM 4.7 and MiniMax M2.1 via opencode.
(If you haven’t tried those open-weight Chinese models, give them a go—they’re not frontier-level like Opus, Gemini 3 Pro, or GPT 5.2, but cheap and great for small projects.)
In under two hours, eden was useful: multiple journals for separating topics.
Real use revealed rough edges, which got fixed. New ideas—like tagging, search, export, and encryption—went in minutes.
The UI had some flag overload, but revisions made it solid and usable.
With my software background, I get the skepticism around “vibe-coding.” But I’m in the AI-first camp now—finishing this project feels liberating.
Admission: I haven’t read the code
The structure’s a mess, but Go culture seems forgiving, so less guilt.
Concluding thoughts
- Statically typed languages like Go work well for this AI-driven style.
- Those open-weight Chinese models are impressive.
- Going back to hand-writing code—for work or personal tools—will be tough.
- I loved TDD; now I need to figure out how it fits in this agentic, AI world.