Quick clarity across tons of ongoing projects.

Returning to a project should not become a project

Projects do not stay neatly inside one application.

Their working reality gets spread across folders, repositories, documents, notes, links, terminals, browser tabs, conversations, and whatever else became necessary while the work was happening.

Every return creates a small chain of recovery:

• Where is the project?
• What was I doing?
• What changed?
• Which document matters?
• What needs attention next?
• Where is the folder, repository, link, terminal, or conversation I need?

None of those interruptions is dramatic. That is why they accumulate so easily.

Repeated throughout the day, mechanical interruptions become cognitive interruptions. Attention that should go into the work gets spent getting back to the work.

One place to reorient

Duck keeps the parts of a project needed for reorientation within immediate reach:

• what the project is and why it exists;
• where it stands;
• what happened recently;
• what needs attention;
• Notes, Todos, Statuses, Links, and Files;
• pinned resources;
• the Local Folder, repository, terminal, GitHub page, and other working locations;
• project chat grounded in evidence Duck can retrieve from the project.

The point is not to keep the user inside Duck.

The point is to make Duck the fastest place to understand where to go next.

The Local Folder remains the project

Duck adds a compact management layer around the project that already exists.

Project files remain ordinary files in the Local Folder. Duck does not create a parallel document store or require the project to be rebuilt inside a proprietary system.

Duck stores its own project state locally with the project.

Project, Activity, Chat

Duck’s project workspace is organized into three focusable columns:

Columns can be collapsed, normalized, expanded, reordered, and grouped. Focusing one column gives it the available working space.

Ask Duck across projects

The main dashboard includes a persistent system-wide chat across configured projects.

It can inspect structured Duck information such as project identities, About profiles, settings, recent Activity, open Todos, and pinned resources.

System-wide chat does not read arbitrary file contents across every project. File retrieval belongs to the chat inside that project.

Local-first, not necessarily local-only

Duck can use a local model endpoint or a remote OpenAI-compatible model provider.

With a local endpoint, inference can remain local. When a remote provider is configured, conversation messages and any project evidence returned through model tools are sent to that provider.

The distinction is explicit because “local-first” should describe actual system behavior, not merely decorate a landing page.

Current status

Duck SoloPM is under active development.

The current implementation is intentionally narrow:

• one user;
• one configured projects root;
• projects discovered as immediate child folders;
• one model endpoint at a time;
• system chat over structured Duck data;
• project chat with read-only file retrieval tools.

Duck SoloPM is released under the GNU General Public License, version 3.