A local-first job tracker that never leaves my machine.

Local-first, BYO-AI, even live on the desktop wallpaper.

Three properties are the point. It stays on disk, no server, no cloud, no telemetry. It's BYOK across three LLMs, Gemini, Anthropic, or OpenAI, switchable from Settings. It paints itself onto the wallpaper via a Wallpaper Engine plugin that listens on a localhost socket and re-renders whenever the app state changes.

A job search is the worst kind of long-running unindexed inbox.

Six months of applying to roles turns Gmail into a haystack, acknowledgments, recruiter outreach, scheduling threads, take-home assignments, and rejections all mixed in with everything else. Generic trackers (Huntr, Teal) want me to upload everything to their cloud. I wanted the opposite: an offline app on my own machine, plus the option to spend a few cents on an LLM call only when I explicitly choose to.

A productivity tool I'd actually trust with my Gmail.

Three increments that each made the next one possible.

One process, three surfaces, one JSON file.

The Electron main process owns everything mutable, the JSON store, the cron timer, the OAuth tokens, the WebSocket server. The renderer process is the operator UI. The wallpaper is a passive listener over the local socket. All three see the same state because they all read from the same in-process source of truth.

// providers/index.js
const PROVIDERS = {
  gemini:    require('./gemini'),     // gemini-2.0-flash
  anthropic: require('./anthropic'),  // claude-haiku-4-5
  openai:    require('./openai'),     // gpt-4o-mini
}

// one shape, three implementations
async function classify(subject, snippet, cfg) {
  if (cfg.provider === 'none') {
    return { jobRelated: null, manual: true }
  }
  const p = PROVIDERS[cfg.provider]
  return await p.classify({
    subject, snippet,
    apiKey: cfg.keys[cfg.provider],
  })
}

// all three speak raw HTTPS, no SDKs, no auth helpers,
// no shared dependency surface between them.

// main process
const wss = new WebSocketServer({
  host: '127.0.0.1',
  port: 49152,
})

wss.on('connection', (ws) => {
  ws.send(JSON.stringify({
    type: 'state', payload: store.snapshot()
  }))
  ws.on('message', (raw) => {
    const m = JSON.parse(raw)
    if (m.type === 'task.toggle') {
      store.toggleTask(m.id)
      broadcast({ type: 'state', payload: store.snapshot() })
    }
  })
})

// wallpaper/wallpaper.html
const ws = new WebSocket('ws://127.0.0.1:49152')
ws.onmessage = (e) => renderState(JSON.parse(e.data))
checkbox.onchange = () => ws.send(...)

What it looks like every morning at 8am.

The desktop app is intentionally dense, stat cards across the top, today's objectives on the left, this-week progress + long-term goals on the right, all editable in-app. The Wallpaper Engine view is a slimmer read-mostly mirror of the same state, painted onto the desktop and kept in sync over the local WebSocket.

7.0Dashboard tab, 224 applications tracked, daily objectives + weekly progress + long-term goals.IMAGE

7.1Wallpaper Engine live view.IMAGE

The same state, painted onto the desktop. A Wallpaper Engine “Web” wallpaper connects to the local WebSocket on 127.0.0.1:49152 and renders the stats, today's objectives, this-week targets, long-term goals, and the deadline countdown, all without focusing the app.

It's two-way: checking a task on the wallpaper marks it done in the app, and vice versa. Both surfaces read from the same in-process JSON store, so they never drift.

7.2Settings, Gmail + AI provider + sync config.IMAGE

7.3Settings, editable daily tasks + long-term goals.IMAGE

Local-only · no public URLJob Hunt is a desktop app, not a hosted site, it lives in the Windows tray and reads your Gmail locally. The screenshots above are from the running Electron build on developer hardware; daily tasks and goals are fully editable in Settings (count tasks track a number, binary tasks are done / not-done).

What I'd keep, what I'd ship next.