CogniNote: the name arrives
An AI notepad with a task board, in the repo that would later be renamed "alter."
A week in early summer 2025 produced CogniNote: “AI-Powered Smart Notepad & Kanban.” The funny detail: it lives in the repository that would later be renamed alter. The name arrived before the product did: the code said CogniNote, and only later did the repo get its new identity.
What it was. Exactly what it says: a notepad where AI helped with your notes, next to a Kanban board (the drag-cards-between-columns style of task board) for your tasks, with real-time collaborative editing, so two people could work the same note at once. The lighter, friendlier product pa2’s lessons pointed at (and, quietly, the first appearance of NestJS: the backend framework Alter still runs on today).
What went wrong. It was a week-long prototype, and it showed. A notepad-plus-task-board is a feature set, not a system: two nice surfaces with nothing underneath holding them together (it was front-end only; there was no real backbone behind the screens). Building it casually, solo, as a single little app meant it could never carry the weight of the actual ambition.
What I decided. Get serious and institutional: set up a proper organisation, and rebuild the thing as a real multi-service platform, the way production software is actually structured.
Next era: alter_1: drowning in plumbing