Foolery: The App
how the cartine codes with vibes
Oh shit, son, the cartine has gone and done it. I built a damn app. The question is, why?
Why?!
When you’re running 12 tmux panes and coding has literally become stream-of-consciousness, the cognitive fatigue is overwhelming. This is all over Reddit, we all know about it.
You thought you told Claude to fix something 3 hours ago, you can’t quite remember, the context is gone, there are 7 orphaned worktrees, 4 opened PRs, and you know this is “better” than what you were doing a year ago, but you FEEL demonstrably worse.
Foolery is the act of embracing the insanity. We’re all in, motherfuckers.
Well WTF Is It?
Tbh we don’t really know what it is yet.
It’s sort of like an issue organizer, llm multiplexer, workflow visualizer, and/or orchestrator.
Is it like OpenClaw?
Go fuck yourself. No. Unless you’re Anthropic. Then, yes. Yes it is. You can have it for 1 billion dollars.
Then I don’t get it.
So you know how when you’re using Claude (or whatever the hell you use) and it’s building a thing and you:
think of something small you want to add or
discover an annoying bug that isn’t really related
so you blast Claude with every shitty thought that flies through your brain, emboldened by this newfound, lascivious power. And of course you blow through the context, Claude breaks 3 other things, half implements the 4 things you asked for all the way, starts calling you Madame Bartholomew, and asks you for a Xanax. Then you go on Reddit and say Anthropic nerfed Claude again.
Foolery is the punching bag for your half-baked ideas and micro-thrashing sense of direction.
Isn’t that what Beads is for? Or Gastown?
Foolery uses Beads under the hood, but…no, it’s not nearly as cool nor as powerful as Gastown.
It’s more like a notepad with cancer (the good kind). It’s for things like, “add an orchestration plane for distributed processing of XYZ”. A true half-baked idea. But it’s also good for piles of nits!
How does it work?
At first it looks like any other issue tracker:
And while you’re screwing around making yourself unemployable, you can look over your “beats” (which are just beads but I love how annoying that is) and “roll” whatever you want:
If you’ve had more coffee, you can think a little bigger:
Think more strategically about which blocks of functionality you want to pursue:
And I never lose track about which things I thought I fixed:
Everyone is doing tuis. Why didn’t you do a tui?
Because tuis suck. Full stop. Hell I’m 90% convinced I should port it to a native app. The only good thing about tuis is hot key navigation - but that’s a first class feature in Foolery:
OK, I might try it. Where should I start?
Install it.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/acartine/foolery/main/scripts/install.sh | bashKeep it open while you use the coding agent of your choice. Discipline yourself to keep the agent focused, but blast all your harebrained ideas into Foolery. You’re gonna love it. And if not, well, it was fucking free.
Are you open to suggestions?
Hell yes. The best ideas I ever had I stole from someone smarter than me. Or better yet, contribute with a PR.
That’s all folks. the cartine thanks you for your time and hopes you enjoyed the show!