Bake Sale
It only ever shows me one task. Bake Sale is a desktop to-do app built like a bakery: I place orders, work them one at a time, and every finished task becomes a pastry on that project's shelf. Small tasks are cookies. Big ones are layer cakes. It opens itself every morning.
- Why
- A long list makes me survey instead of work. The one-at-a-time limit is the whole product, not a nice-to-have. It has since become my only task system, and the next problem I gave it is that our work is disappearing into a backlog.
- How long
- First version in one session, July 15, 2026.
How I built it
- I wrote a spec with a hard rule (one task in progress, ever) and a list of what it would not do.
- I had Claude Code build the one-task loop and the shelves first and save the art for last.
- I added a test that fails the build if the working view ever shows the queue.
- I had the pastries illustrated one object at a time from one photo reference.
- I set Windows Task Scheduler to open the app every morning.
- I later moved the tasks into a database so other tools could add to them.
- To copy it you need
- Claude, or the AI of your choice. A desktop app needs a few free developer tools installed, which your AI can walk you through. The gotcha: the desktop icon runs a saved copy. Changes don't show up until you rebuild it, and I once used a version that predated a whole feature.
Try it yourself
Copy this prompt and paste it into ChatGPT or Claude to try it yourself.
I want to copy Bake Sale from Frances Tang's What Are We Building profile. It is a to-do app with one rule: it only ever shows the single task she is working on, never the list. Finished tasks turn into pastries on a shelf per project, sized by effort, so she can see what she shipped. Her gotcha: an early version couldn't tell an empty list from a list it failed to load, and it saved the empty one over the real one, so make it refuse to save when loading failed. Help me build a starter version as a single web page I can open on my computer: add a task, show only the current one, and collect finished ones on a shelf. I'll choose my own theme instead of a bakery. Start by asking what theme I want. Ask me for anything you need.
Tools I used for this project
