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No. 64 · 2026Concept

Idea Factory

A personal idea dump that lives entirely on Modal. Type `idea "thing"` from any terminal and it lands in a SQLite DB on a Modal Volume. The precursor to the /ideas page on this site, same instinct, different surface.

Status
Concept
Year
2026
Stack
Modal · FastAPI · SQLite · CLI · Productivity
Proof
Deployed on Modal, in daily use

The Idea

A lot of good ideas die because the friction of writing them down is higher than the friction of letting them slip. Idea Factory is the lowest-friction capture surface I could think of: one shell command from any terminal and the idea is saved forever.

idea "two computers pointed at each other, talking in QR codes"

That's it. No app to open, no login, no taxonomy decisions at capture time. Tags and embeddings and connections come later, when you have time to think.

The Stack

  • Client: a single ./idea Python script with no pip dependencies, pure stdlib HTTP. Drop it anywhere on PATH and it works.
  • Server: FastAPI on Modal, SQLite on a Modal Volume for persistence.
  • Auth: an X-API-Token header checked against a Modal secret. Single-user, no signup flow.
  • Cost: min_containers=0, scales to zero when idle. Effectively free when I'm not typing into it.

The Schema

Forward-compatible for everything I might want later without locking anything in now:

ideas (
  id, created_at, text,
  source,       . 'cli' today, 'voice'/'web' tomorrow
  audio_url,    , when voice capture lands
  tags,         , when LLM auto-tagging lands
  summary,      , when LLM summarization lands
  embedding,    , when semantic search lands
  raw_metadata  , catch-all JSON for anything else
)

The pattern: capture cleanly, enrich lazily. Most ideas never need the enrichment. The ones that do, get it on demand.

What It Became

Idea Factory is the precursor to the /ideas page on this site. Same instinct, keep the capture friction lower than the inhibition threshold, but with a web-facing version that lives in public. The Modal-hosted version still exists as the CLI fallback and as the place where things go when I don't want them on the public site yet.

Status

Built and deployed. Used regularly. The CLI surface is the right answer to "lowest-friction capture", at least until voice capture lands, which is the next thing.

Pairs with The Red Phone (where voice-captured ideas eventually live) and with Cairn (where the longer-form idea-to-action pipeline gets thought about).