Project
Dump it: an iPhone app to clear your context
Messy thoughts in, sorted thoughts out. Nothing leaves your phone.
In Do LLMs think like us? I wrote about how my own thinking resembles a context window, and why clearing it is so much harder for me than for an AI model. When an LLM starts acting up, it’s usually time for a fresh context. I wish I could do this in my head as cleanly. What we really need are good tools and methods: solid, low friction tools that invite efficient thinking organically. Happily, we are in a golden age where you can will such tools into existence in a night or so with the help of coding agents.
And yet, I spent weeks on my first attempt at one, an iPhone app I have come to call ‘Dump it’.
It took weeks because while Claude happily (and speedily) put a couple of buttons on screen and wired them up for me with pages and animations, deciding which of them actually deserved to be there and how they should truly behave took a while. ‘Dump it’ uses the built-in on-device Apple foundation model to turn the simple ‘to-do app’ and ‘calendar’ concept into something that uses AI to be low friction and private, and aims to invite efficient thinking.
It also serves to show that applications don’t need to be fully “AI-ified”. All it does for you is take your rough input, tag it, extract dates and times (this one’s pretty bulletproof now) and clean it up for you to review when you have time. You’re in control; it just deals with the annoying part of filling out a whole entry.
The premise? Bring your thoughts, your tasks, your feelings and mantras in natural language, and ‘dump’ them, without planning or categorization. It helps you get things down before you forget them. Later, when you have time to review, these entries are already auto-categorized and cleaned up, ready to either be committed to your context or discarded entirely. Finally, these entries are only surfaced when you need to see them in the form of 3 briefings a day. It doesn’t think for you (nor should it), but it clears the fluff out of the way so you think more clearly yourself.
I’m still testing and tweaking it, but when I put it out it’ll be free (because you already paid for the on-device model in the price of the phone). I finally ponied up the 99$ for an Apple developer account to get this to more people, so you can actually try it out on TestFlight!
- Bear in mind it will require an iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max or later (16/17/18 generation) because of their on-device model processing capability.
This started off as something for me, but living with it, tuning it and getting to grips with what such an app can provide I think it can be useful for other people as well.
I truly believe people have more potential than they give themselves credit for, but just like your LLM, we can use tools to help us out. I hope this can be one for you.