Cadence

Compile your intentions into a day.

Overview

What is Cadence?

Cadence is a life-structure compiler: it turns flexible human intention into an adaptive daily timeline. You don't schedule individual tasks. Instead you define recurring routine templates made of time blocks, choose each day what state you'll be in for each block (an intent plus optional activities), and let Cadence compile those decisions into a concrete, ordered timeline — complete with buffers and transitions — that reflows live as your day changes.

The guiding question is "What state am I in during this block today?" rather than "What task must I do at this time?"

Cadence ships as a mobile-first, installable PWA.

Why Use Cadence?

Rigid calendars and task lists assume your day goes exactly as planned. It never does. Cadence is built for the way life actually moves: you set the structure once, make lightweight per-block decisions each morning, and adjust on the fly while the system reflows everything downstream for you. It is not a task manager, a rigid calendar, or a habit tracker — it's the layer that translates how you want to spend your energy into a timeline you can actually follow.

Key Features

• Routine Templates: Build reusable weekly structures from ordered time blocks, then assign them to weekdays, weekends, or custom date ranges.
• Daily Intents: Each day, instantiate a template and pick the behavioral state for each block — recovery, deep work, movement, and more — with optional concrete activities, energy, and focus settings.
• Deterministic Compiler: A PHP-only engine compiles your decisions into a versioned, ordered timeline with buffers and transitions. The server is always the single source of truth; the client shows a cosmetic preview.
• Live Runtime Adjustments: Edit your day as it happens and watch the rest of the timeline reflow within each block's flexibility tolerance.
• Check-ins & History: Log started, completed, or skipped against each block with actual start and end times.
• Google Calendar Sync: Optional two-way calendar integration, with a no-op driver so everything keeps working without it.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Ensure you have the following installed. Verify each by running the provided command in your terminal.

1. PHP 8.3+ is required for the application. Check with:

   php --version

2. Composer manages PHP dependencies. Verify with:

   composer --version

3. Node and NPM manage frontend dependencies. Check with:

   node --version
   npm --version

Installation

1. Duplicate the example environment file:

   cp .env.example .env

2. Install PHP and JavaScript dependencies:

   composer install
   npm install

3. Generate a new application key:

   php artisan key:generate

4. Run the database migrations and seed demo data:

   php artisan migrate --seed

5. Start the backend and the Vite frontend (run each in its own terminal):

   php artisan serve
   npm run dev

   Then visit the app and sign in with the demo account: demo@cadence.test / password.

Development

Tech Stack

• Backend: Laravel 12 (PHP 8.3+), Inertia.js, Fortify auth, SQLite in development.
• Frontend: Vue 3 (<script setup lang="ts">), TypeScript, Tailwind CSS v4, shadcn-vue / Reka UI, Pinia.
• Mobile/PWA: mobile-first UI, installable PWA via vite-plugin-pwa.

Testing

php artisan test    # Pest (backend)
npm run test        # Vitest (frontend)

Linting & Formatting

./vendor/bin/pint   # PHP
npm run lint        # ESLint
npm run types:check # vue-tsc

Configuration

All tunables — buffers, rest windows, tolerance, intelligence thresholds, calendar, and plugins — live in config/cadence.php. Google Calendar sync requires GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID, GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET, and GOOGLE_REDIRECT_URI; without them the null calendar driver keeps everything working.