This past week I've been working on the spreadsheets in https://blackbear.app hoping to get the latest changes released sometime today -- how do you think they stack up? also how are you testing performance?

(note, you can test the spreadsheets by continuing through the login page at https://my.blackbear.app as an anonymous user)

I've got a suite of CSVs that represent both edge case and performance issues, and I script timing opening/common operations using Apple Scripting. It's not perfect, but it gives us a sense if we're introducing back-breaking regressions. I try for our large files to test specifically with real-world, large data dumps from US government sources; I feel these are representative of actual large-CSV workloads. You can see me popping off about it on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/wyattkirby.com/post/3mnfvma4cgk2g

We're not necessarily aiming to be the fastest application in the world; find/replace is probably still faster to just do sed in the terminal. But if you're looking to do something like sort, filter, actually engage with the tabular data, then we can handle hundreds of thousands of rows --- files that excel won't even open.

I'll take a look at blackbear. One core difference I see is that we're a native app, fully offline. There is a single handshake with the licensing server on app start, but it's optional. License validation is handled fully locally, and missing network access is non-blocking for any features.

I left my job as a principal software engineer a few months back and have been working on an agentic harness and https://blackbear.app -- a local first, end-to-end encrypted everything app with file editors for notes, documents, sheets, free-hand canvases, slides, and a whole lot more. Also features a calendar and task system, and a lightweight discovery engine. There's a BYOK agent system (Pax) that works with you across the whole app (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and local Ollama support). Works in a browser, from the CLI, and from native mac and linux apps (mobile on the way). Not exactly sure my end goal yet, but it's been fascinating building these things

Oh, and all the editors support real-time collaboration. There's messaging, voice and video calls, and a lightweight contact management system that I'm still iterating on

Hi. As you are deeply thinking about these sorts of things, I want to see what you think of my https://useorganizer.com which turns the todo idea on its head a bit by being timeline oriented.

Seems very cool! I like the concept. I am still designing a "project" sort of organization primitive myself, which would incorporate more time based views of progress.

Just from browsing around and playing with it a bit, it seems there's still a lot of polish needing to be done. Quite a few areas where data is leaking across UI boundaries and some of the hard problems like data management and retention are stubbed (export is nice but it's the floor imo)

Thanks! And absolutely there is a big tidy up and code review on the horizon for this repo.

Data storage changed direction a few times as I heavily used this and found things that seemed fine in theory didn't work out in practice.

A big one was using syncthing and folder sharing in the browser had all sorts of issues for this app and how it operates.

I'll probably add a sign soon to say this is alpha (as in before beta, a prototype) software.

It is vibe coded and is also an experiment is using AI more wildly than I would at work

Thanks for wording that kindly and thoughtfully. Some may have said it is trash and moved on :)

What is pax?

Pax is just what I call the agent inside of Blackbear. It's a model agnostic harness, e.g. you can use Claude (Fable, Opus, Sonnet, Haiku), GPT 5.6, or Qwen to provide the inference.

The harness gives the model a set of tools and guidance for working within Blackbear, so Pax regardless of the model you supply can help you write notes, manage a spreadsheet, organize your space, etc.