Desk

Desk is an AI workspace where you own the output — a flexible harness for organizing AI-enabled conversations and projects. It is live and free to use.

For a long time I have been unhappy with the basics of managing and organizing AI conversations and agent activities. If I wanted to turn a random chat into a project I basically had to start over. If I had artifacts or materials generated in one context, I had to export and re-upload them somewhere else. And I couldn't easily reformat the output of a conversation into a more useful shape. These are all things that other kinds of software have done for years — so I built Desk to scratch my own itch.

The Problem

A chat interface is a great place to start thinking and a terrible place to keep anything. The conversation is the only container, so everything lives as an undifferentiated scroll: a packing list, a map of places to visit, a comparison of programming languages, and a half-finished budget all look the same and live in the same flat stream.

The moment a casual chat starts to matter — the moment it becomes a project— the tools fall down. You can't promote a thread into something with structure. You can't carry the materials you generated into the next conversation. And the output stays trapped as prose when what you actually wanted was a checklist, a calendar, or a grid of options you could act on.

The Approach

Desk has two parts: a scratchpad for random, low-stakes chats, and projects, which any conversation can be added to. Nothing has to start as a project. You think out loud in the scratchpad, and when a conversation earns it, you move it into a project without starting over — the materials come with it.

The core move is reformatting. Any conversation can be reformatted in place as a map, a checklist, an image grid, or a calendar. Reformatted conversations are stored as HTML, so you can keep adding to and editing them with follow-up interactions — the artifact is durable, not a one-shot render. Voice input is included throughout. And once a conversation has been formatted with a template, an agent process automatically checks it for updates and additions every 24 hours.

The scratchpad

The scratchpad is the front door. Each conversation is a card, and each card can take whatever shape fits its content. In the view below, “Best Sights and Attractions” has been reformatted as an image grid of Rome landmarks, the vegetarian-meal thread as a tagged shopping checklist, and the language comparison stays as free-form chat. They sit side by side, each in its most useful form, and every card has a mic and a “Continue here” box so you can keep the conversation going inline.

Projects

A project gathers the related conversations for one effort in a single place. A trip, for example, is rarely one chat — it's the itinerary, the packing list, the budget, and the map of places to go, each its own conversation, each in its own format, all under one roof. Reformatted artifacts stay editable, so the packing list below is a real checklist you can tick off and the map is an interactive map with pins and notes, not a screenshot of one.

Where It's Going

Desk is a web app for now, but I plan to rewrite it in Swift for iOS and iPadOS — the side-by-side, touch-and-voice interaction model wants a native home. I also want to push much further on agentic behavior, so the artifacts become more persistent and smarter about their project context. In a trip plan, for instance, the itinerary, the list of sights, and the calendar are obviously related; changing the sights you want to see should update the trip calendar on its own. The 24-hour refresh agent is the first small step toward artifacts that maintain themselves.

Free, and You Own the Output

Desk is completely free to use. You bring your own AI API key, which is gathered through an end-to-end encrypted flow and is not readable by me or anyone else. That choice is the point of the project as much as a cost decision: it's an AI workspace where the output, the materials, and the key are all yours.

If you're curious, you can try it at deskapp.me.

My Role

Desk is a solo project — product strategy, UX, visual design, and full-stack implementation, all mine. It started as a tool I wanted for myself and turned into a small bet on a different default for AI software: that conversations should be promotable, output should be reformattable and durable, and the workspace should belong to the person using it.