Your inbox is
managing you.
Ballast is a personal operating system for senior engineers and technical leaders. Four AI agents that sit between the noise and your attention.
Every morning you open Slack and email and immediately you're on defence. Someone needs a decision. There's a thread you weren't copied on. Three things flagged urgent that aren't. By the time you've processed it, half the morning is gone and you haven't touched your actual work.
No launch date. No spam. Just early access.
Senior engineers don't have an attention problem. They have a system problem. The tools meant to keep them organised have become the thing they manage. Notion databases with 400 items. Linear boards nobody reads. Task managers that accumulate faster than they empty.
The volume is real. The reactivity is real. What's missing is a layer that triages for you, knows what today's actual priority is, and keeps that in front of you — without you having to curate it.
Ballast inverts that.
Four agents. One system.
Each agent handles a specific part of your day. They share context, so what you capture in the morning shapes your plan, and your plan shapes your evening review.
Every capture. One place. Categorised automatically.
Drop in a task, message, thought, or meeting note. Catch classifies it — stream, urgency, action type — and decides whether it needs you today or can wait. Your inbox stops being a to-do list.
Voice input supported. Asks clarifying questions for ambiguous captures.A daily briefing. Every morning. No dashboards required.
At 7am you get a clear picture: what's on today, what carried from yesterday, what you actually completed last week. Not a wall of metrics — a concise read on where things stand so you can start with intent.
End-of-day reviews track patterns over time.Time-blocked days. Signal vs noise, automatically sorted.
Plan takes your captured items and your calendar and builds a time-blocked schedule. It classifies tasks as signal (advances your actual priorities) or noise (can be deferred) and budgets your day accordingly.
~80% signal / 20% noise. You set the intention; Plan enforces it.Focus protection. Coming soon
Activates macOS Focus Mode during deep work. Blocks your configured distractions. Generates a micro-briefing on what you missed when you come back up for air.
In private testing. Available in the cloud tier.Self-hosted is free. Always.
The cloud tier funds development. If you'd rather run it yourself, you always can — no licence, no expiry, no catch.
- Catch — full triage
- Pulse — daily briefings + reviews
- Unlimited captures
- Local SQLite storage
- Open source
- Everything in Free
- Plan — time-blocked scheduling
- Shield — focus protection (macOS)
- Cloud sync
- macOS notifications
- Priority support
- Everything in Solo
- Shared signal across your team
- Visibility into blockers
- Fewer 1:1s needed
What's real, what's not.
Ballast is in private early access. Catch, Pulse, and Plan are running — I use them every day. Shield is built but still being refined, which is why it's not leading the page.
I'm not announcing a launch date because I don't have one. What I have is a working self-hosted system and a small group of senior engineers I'm testing it with. Deployment configs for cloud hosting just landed. When I'm confident the cloud version is solid, the waitlist opens.
The self-hosted version is available now. If you want to try it today, clone the repo. It runs on a Mac with Podman and an Ollama install — no cloud required, no API keys needed.
Get early access.
I'm looking for Staff+ engineers, tech leads, and platform/infra leaders for early validation. Leave your details and I'll reach out personally.
You're on the list. I'll be in touch personally.
Ben Swinney
Senior engineer in Melbourne. I built Ballast because my own productivity system kept growing until it was the thing I was managing, not the other way around. Evenings and weekends. Not vaporware.
Ballast is open-core. The self-hosted version is free and always will be. The cloud version funds continued development.