Follow-through without a project manager.
Cadence notices the promises inside your calls and threads — "I'll send that by Friday" — and keeps each one on a list until it is actually done, so the thing you meant to do stops depending on you remembering to type it in.
Cadence is a macOS commitment tracker that pulls action items out of your meetings, Slack threads and mail instead of waiting for you to type them. When you say you will send something by Friday, it captures the promise, who it was made to, and the call or message it came from, then keeps it visible until you close it. Nothing lands on your list without your say-so.
Why action items go missing
Almost nobody has a storage problem with their tasks. To-do apps are mature and good — Things, Todoist, Reminders, a project board at work — and if a commitment reaches one of them it will generally get done. The failure happens earlier, at capture. A promise is made out loud on a Thursday call, or halfway down a Slack thread, or in the third paragraph of a reply you fired off between meetings, and it never gets transcribed into the system that would have chased it.
The current workarounds all lean on the same fragile step. A notetaker produces an action-items list at the end of a transcript, which is genuinely useful and which you have to remember to open. A colleague sends a recap mail that you star and never revisit. Or you re-type it yourself: hear the promise, switch app, phrase the task, add a date, come back. That works perfectly on a calm day and fails precisely on a busy one, which is the only kind of day where it mattered.
Cadence attacks the capture step instead of the storage step. It reads the material you already produce — meeting notes from Joey, your connected Slack and Gmail, your own dictated notes — and looks for the shape of a commitment: a first-person future tense with an obligation in it, made to somebody, sometimes with a date. Each one it finds is proposed to you as a tracked item rather than silently added, quoting the exact sentence that created it and linking back to where it was said.
The result is a list of promises rather than a list of intentions. It knows who the promise was made to, which matters more than any category or tag, because the question that actually wakes people at 3am is not "is this task done" but "does someone out there think I am doing this".
How to track action items from meetings and email
Four steps. Three of them are things you were doing anyway.
- Give it the places promises get madeConnect Slack, Gmail and Read.ai individually — each with its own sign-in, each revocable on its own — or let Joey take notes on your calls. One source is enough to start; calendar is coming.
- Have the meeting, send the mailNothing changes about how you work. You do not tag anything, say a magic phrase, or announce that something was a commitment. Cadence reads what was already captured.
- Review what it proposesOpen Cadence and you get a short list of candidate commitments, each quoting the sentence it came from and naming the person it was made to. Keep it, edit the wording or the date, or dismiss it. Nothing is tracked until you say yes.
- Close it when it is doneMark it off and it leaves the list. Anything still open keeps its age visible, so a promise made three weeks ago looks like a promise made three weeks ago rather than a line item indistinguishable from this morning's.
Tip. Open commitments resurface in Signals alongside the rest of your day, which is the mechanism that actually matters — a list you have to remember to open is just a slower version of forgetting.
What Cadence does that a to-do app cannot
The task arrives from the conversation.
You do not transcribe your own promises. What you said on a call or wrote in a thread is read where it was said, so the commitments that never survived the walk back to your desk stop disappearing there.
Each item shows the sentence that created it.
Every tracked commitment carries the exact line — "I'll get you the revised numbers by Friday" — and a link to the call, thread or message it came from. You can always see whether it heard you correctly, in one click.
A promise has a person on the other end.
Cadence records who the commitment was made to, not just what it was. That is the field that makes the list feel real, and the one no to-do app asks for because it has no way of knowing.
Nothing lands on your list without you.
Candidates are shown for review, never silently added. Wrong readings get dismissed in a keystroke, and a system that quietly invents obligations for you is one you would stop trusting inside a week.
"By Friday" becomes a date. "Soon" does not.
Stated deadlines are turned into actual dates. Vague ones are left vague rather than assigned an invented deadline, because a fake due date is worse than no due date — it teaches you to ignore the real ones.
The reading can happen on your Mac.
Fetching from Slack or Gmail needs the network, obviously. Recognising a commitment inside the text does not — in Private mode that runs against a local model, so the contents of your calls and threads stay on the machine.
Cadence vs a to-do app or project tool
Todoist, Things and Asana are all better than Cadence at being a to-do app, and this table is not going to pretend otherwise.
| Cadence | Todoist / Things / Asana | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting the task onto the list | Read out of the conversation | You type it in |
| Knows where the task came from | Quotes the line, links the source | Only if you paste a link yourself |
| Records who it was promised to | Yes | Rarely — assignee, not recipient |
| Projects, boards and dependencies | No — it tracks promises | Yes, and properly |
| Shared with a team | No, the list is yours | Yes |
| Recurring chores and errands | Not its job | Yes |
| Available on your phone | No — macOS only | Yes |
| Catches what you forgot you agreed to | Yes | No — you cannot type what you forgot |
If your work is a shared board with owners, dependencies and a sprint, keep it — Cadence is not a project tool and will make a bad one. It also has nothing to offer for buying milk. What it solves is the step before the board: the commitments made verbally, in passing, to a person who is now quietly waiting. Plenty of people should run both, with Cadence as the net and the project tool as the plan.
What Cadence reads, and where
Only what you have given it. Meeting notes and dictations you captured yourself are already on your Mac; Slack, Gmail and Read.ai are each connected separately, through their own sign-in, and each can be revoked on its own without disturbing the others. Revoke everything and Cadence keeps working on the notes you took yourself.
In Private mode, the work of spotting a commitment inside a paragraph is done by a model running on your Mac, so the text of your calls and threads is never handed to anyone. In Connected mode, only the passage a given extraction needs goes to a hosted frontier model — Anthropic or OpenAI — and never your full history. Bring your own key and that request goes from your Mac straight to the provider, not through Stilou.
Nothing is used to train a model, by us or by the providers. The commitments themselves live in your Brain, which is a set of files on your own disk — so the record of what you promised is yours to read, export or delete, and nobody else holds a copy.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get action items out of my meetings automatically?
Have Joey take notes on the call, or connect Read.ai, and Cadence reads the resulting notes for commitments. Each one it finds is proposed with the sentence that produced it, and you keep, edit or dismiss it. The same works on connected Slack and Gmail, so a promise made in a thread is caught the same way.
Does it add things to my list without asking?
No. Every candidate is proposed for review and nothing is tracked until you accept it. That is deliberate — an assistant that quietly invents obligations on your behalf is one you would stop opening after the second wrong entry.
Can it tell the difference between a real promise and small talk?
Mostly, and where it is unsure you see the quoted line and decide in a keystroke. It looks for first-person commitments made to someone — "I'll send", "I'll set that up" — rather than every sentence containing a verb. Wrong readings happen, which is exactly why the source sentence is always shown.
Does it replace Todoist or Asana?
No, and it should not. Those are better at projects, recurring tasks, teams and phones. Cadence handles the step before them: catching the commitment at the moment it was made. Many people keep both and move accepted items into their planner.
Is it reading my email and Slack on someone's server?
Not in Private mode — recognising a commitment runs against a model on your Mac and the text stays there. In Connected mode only the specific passage needed is sent to a hosted model, never your whole mailbox, and nothing is used for training. Each source is connected and revoked individually by you.
What happens to a commitment I never finish?
It stays on the list and its age stays visible, so a three-week-old promise reads as a three-week-old promise. Open items also resurface in Signals with the rest of your day. Nothing is auto-closed, auto-archived, or quietly retired after a fortnight.
Does it chase people who owe me things?
It tracks them, but it does not send anything on your behalf. Commitments other people made to you can be recorded from the same calls and threads; the follow-up is still yours to send, which most people prefer to an app mailing their clients unsupervised.
What do I need to run it?
A Mac on a current version of macOS, plus an account on each service you choose to connect. Private-mode extraction runs best on Apple silicon. There is a free tier and the app updates itself. There is no iOS or Windows version.