cos / Cowork OS

What it is

cos (“Cowork OS”) is my personal operating system: one place to see the things that run a day — finances, tasks, upcoming dates — without scattering them across separate apps. Its current form is a single static, self-contained dashboard.html, generated from local data and built on the same design language as WNAC (WNAC dark, cos light).

What worked

The core idea held up. A single legible surface beats juggling five tools, and pulling finances, tasks, and dates into one view makes the day’s state readable at a glance. Building it myself means it fits my workflow.

What broke

cos started in the terminal — a Textual mission-control, then a terminal-primary rebuild. Both were retired. The terminal was a fast way to scaffold the idea and a poor home for what cos actually wanted to be: a glanceable, Copilot-style dashboard. That pull toward visual legibility is what moved it to HTML and onto a shared design language with WNAC.

Lessons

• Let the surface follow the job. cos is something you glance at through the day; a visual dashboard fits that, and a terminal fought it.
• Reuse your own design language. Converging cos and WNAC on one Copilot-derived system (cos light, WNAC dark) means one set of design decisions serves both projects.
• Ownership is the motivation and the trap. Building my own tool is what makes me use it, and what tempts me to over-build.

Status

Current, mid-redesign. The terminal versions are retired; a static HTML dashboard is the living form, and the visual rebuild — shared with WNAC — is in progress.