SONET

Apple already built the life OS. Calendar, Notes, Reminders, Health — they're on every device, they sync, they work. The problem isn't the apps. The problem is that nobody's making them smarter.

Every AI productivity tool I looked at wanted me to move my life into their app. Notion AI. Todoist AI. Motion. They all say the same thing: "Come to us." That's the wrong pitch. My calendars are already set up. My notes are in Apple Notes. My reminders have location triggers configured. I'm not moving.

So I built the thing that should exist: an AI layer that reads from Apple's apps, thinks about what it finds, and writes back. You never leave your workflow. The intelligence is invisible.

What It Actually Does

SONET runs 14 automated tasks on a 24-hour cycle. Each one does exactly one thing:

• Daily Briefing — Reads calendar, reminders, and inbox at 6:30 AM. Writes a structured morning brief to Apple Notes. It's there when I pick up my phone.
• Afternoon Triage — Runs at 2 PM. What shifted today? What needs attention before tomorrow? What can wait?
• Weekly Review — Friday. Aggregates the whole week. Patterns, anomalies, things I said I'd do that I didn't.
• Content Pipeline — Scans industry sources, drafts posts, breaks long-form into LinkedIn and Instagram pieces.
• System Health — 1 AM. Did everything run? Are the launchd agents alive? Anything weird in the logs?

These aren't generic LLM calls. Each prompt took months to get right — what to read, how to structure the output, when to send a notification versus staying quiet. The prompts are the real IP. The orchestration is plumbing.

Why It's a Mac App

Apple Notes has no iOS API. None. The only way to read and write Notes programmatically is AppleScript on macOS. That one constraint shaped the entire architecture.

Which means: Mac App Store is out too. The sandbox blocks AppleScript. So it's a notarized DMG — download, drag to Applications, done.

And Anthropic doesn't allow OAuth for third-party apps, so there's no "Sign in with Claude." Instead, SONET supports two modes:

• CLI Mode — If you have Claude Pro or Max, SONET spawns claude -p with the task prompt. Uses your existing subscription. Free.
• API Mode — If you have an API key, SONET calls the Messages API directly. Streaming, tool use, prompt caching. Costs pennies per month.

The Hard Part Nobody Sees

Scheduling sounds simple. It's not.

The Mac sleeps. WiFi drops. Claude CLI hangs sometimes. A task that ran fine 200 times fails on attempt 201 because Apple changed something in a point release. SONET handles all of it: 30-second polling with wake recovery, skip-if-unchanged logic (don't re-run the briefing if the calendar hasn't changed), structured output validation, and conditional notifications.

That reliability layer — the boring part — is the actual product. Anyone can write a prompt. Making it run correctly at 6:30 AM every single day for months? That's the work.

Where It Stands

SONET v1 has been running 24/7 on a Mac Mini since early 2026. Fourteen tasks, five launchd agents, zero babysitting. v2 is turning it from a personal tool into something other people can use — onboarding, template configuration, the context wizard that replaces my hand-written system config.

The question I keep coming back to: what would your mornings look like if the thinking had already been done before you woke up?