Cadence

A native macOS task manager with drag-and-drop time blocking and an AI agent driven by your local AI CLI (claude, codex, …).

Status: M1–M5 built and passing — 189 tests, plus live end-to-end tests against a real CLI covering scheduling and memory self-correction.

Install

Download Cadence-macOS.zip from Releases, unzip, and drag Cadence.app to /Applications.

The build is ad-hoc signed only — no Developer ID, no notarisation — so Gatekeeper will refuse it on first launch. Either right-click the app and choose Open, or clear the quarantine flag:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Cadence.app

Requires macOS 15 or later. Building it yourself avoids all of this.

Three view modes, switched from the toolbar or the View menu: List, Calendar, and Split (list on the left, grid on the right — drag from one to the other to schedule). The assistant panel opens with ⌘/.

AI

Point Settings › AI at your CLI (claude by default) and press Test Connection. Cadence hosts a local MCP server on 127.0.0.1 with a per-run bearer token and hands the CLI a --mcp-config pointing at it. No API key is stored; the CLI uses its own sign-in.

Everything the model does is staged and reviewed before it is saved. To run the live end-to-end check (spends tokens on your subscription):

TEST_RUNNER_CADENCE_LIVE_CLI=1 xcodebuild -project Cadence.xcodeproj \
  -scheme Cadence -destination 'platform=macOS' \
  -only-testing:CadenceTests/LiveCLITests test

Build

brew install xcodegen          # once
xcodegen generate              # regenerate Cadence.xcodeproj after adding files
open Cadence.xcodeproj

Or from the command line:

xcodebuild -project Cadence.xcodeproj -scheme Cadence -destination 'platform=macOS' build
xcodebuild -project Cadence.xcodeproj -scheme Cadence -destination 'platform=macOS' test

Cadence.xcodeproj is generated — edit project.yml, never the project file. New source files are picked up automatically by path, so xcodegen generate is only needed when adding files or changing settings.

Data lives at ~/Library/Application Support/Cadence/cadence.sqlite. In DEBUG the migrator erases and rebuilds when the schema changes, so editing a migration during development throws away local data — that is intentional for now and must be removed before this holds anything worth keeping.

What it is

• Tasks with projects, tags, notes, and subtasks
• A week/day calendar where you drag tasks onto the grid to schedule them
• Your real Apple Calendar shown behind your blocks as a read-only busy overlay
• An AI agent that can create, break down, and schedule tasks — invoked from buttons, a brain-dump composer, or a chat panel — always through a reviewable, undoable proposal

Documents

Doc	Contents
docs/SPEC.md	Product + technical specification
docs/AI-INTEGRATION.md	AI CLI bridge, tool catalog, interaction surfaces

Locked decisions

1. macOS only. No iPhone companion, no sync. Local SQLite.
2. Apple Calendar is read-only. We display busy time; we never write events.
3. Single user (me). No onboarding, no accounts, no App Store. Ship as a local .app built from Xcode.