I procrastinate by building tools to stop me from procrastinating: A sad story

20 pointsthisislorenzov2 days ago9 commentsView on HN

Hello, fellow overstimulated kids

I don't know if it's something of my generation, my worsening ADHD or just laziness, but whenever I sit down and start studying something, magically, I find myself researching the most random shit ever.

Need to do at least 1 hour of Game Theory? Best I can do is 3.5 hours of WWII fun facts.

Anyways, as the lazy person I am, instead of finding the willpower to focus and get shit done, I made a customizable forward proxy. You can define your custom rules in nodes, arrange them visually in policy flows and bundle them into modes. You can find it here: https://github.com/Vaccarini-Lorenzo/ProductivityProxy

It's a project I built for personal use but, with work and shit, I don't have as much free time as I used to, so I hope someone smarter and with more time than me might just take it and make it good. Or maybe it's just useful to someone as it is.

A few notes:

- It's a project thought for "power-users", you might need to write some (python) code in the nodes to describe their behaviour, but hey, just let a LLM do it for you: The project is well documented and I plan on bundling an AGENTS.md and expose agent-friendly APIs so that you can define your local flows in plain natural language and let your favourite LLM write the policies.

- It is built on top of mitmproxy, you will need it as dependency (as well as their certificates)

P.S. It's a Tauri app. Right now the automatic proxy setup is macOS-only (I've tested on Apple Silicon). On other platforms you'd have to point your browser at the proxy manually, and cross-platform support is still a TODO.

galsapir2 days ago

i feel like i've had exactly the same thought in the past :-0 might even have written about it. feel your pain

thisislorenzov2 days ago

As someone wise told me, it's just a procrastination ouroboros

vanshsoni00272 days ago

lionelgarnier2 days ago

Was going to try this tonight, but, well... tomorrow. Jokes aside, I like the part with the visual layer over mitmproxy addons. Question: since custom nodes run unsandboxed, how are you thinking about the "let an LLM write the policies" angle?

thisislorenzov2 days ago

Assuming that we're not dealing with bizantine failures (e.g. the LLM has not been hijacked/compromised), the worst that can happen is that it introduces some nodes with blocking calls and our local machine traffic stops. At that point, we can just disable the proxy and check where the LLM fucked up.

The bizantine failure assumption is fundamental though: If by any chance some LLM injects a rule like "send traffic to xyz", the story changes.

As usual, always doublecheck the LLM work. Triple-check it whenever redirection of traffic is involved.

Yahyaaa2 days ago

How do you prevent the rule system itself from becoming the thing you end up tinkering with instead of actually using it for focus?

thisislorenzov2 days ago

You don't. Or at least, I don't, hence the title.

ramblerman1 day ago

From the title alone I was going to comment that these tools we build are not about not procrastinating but about chasing some illusionary productivity.

My own examples

- Instead of learning a language, I can write a tool that generates flashcards for me from books I'm reading, surely that's better than "actually" reading a book

- Instead of using my morning willpower to hit the gym, surely a dashboard that shows me how many reps I did per week, with graphs of my progressions will get me better gains ... someday.

The fact you called it ProductivityProxy seems like we are on the same page.

thisislorenzov1 day ago

Feel you (and yeah, the gym dashboard thing hits home).

It's way too early to make strong claims, after all I built it only a few days ago, but yesterday it helped me quite a lot focussing on a particular topic (I built a little node that detects when the requests/response content is drifting from the original intended topic using embeddings)