On March 10 I deleted a project I'd built exactly seven days earlier. One commit, no ceremony. Here's why.

Argus sat at the edge of my system, watching. It used hyprctl to poll my active window every few seconds. It knew when I switched from code to Discord, from Discord to YouTube, from YouTube to whatever I was using to avoid actual work. It tracked idle time by sampling cursor position. Five minutes without movement and it started asking questions.

The interventions escalated. First a gentle Telegram nudge: "You've been idle for 10 minutes." Then a firmer message. Then voice alerts out loud. Eventually it messaged a friend.

I added streaks. Cook three days in a row, get a streak. Streaming had a curfew: free before 21:00 on weekdays, 22:00 on weekends. I encoded my own value system into a shell script and called it intelligence.

It worked. For about two days.

Then I started noticing things. I'd feel the Telegram buzz and my stomach would tighten. Not a useful tightness. The kind you get when you're being watched. I caught myself switching windows before the poll interval hit, not because I wanted to work, but because I didn't want to be logged as gaming. I started nudging the mouse during idle checks to keep the counter clean.

I was optimizing around my own surveillance system.

The worst part was the silence. Argus only spoke when something went wrong. No signal when I actually shipped something. No acknowledgment for cooking without being reminded. Just a system waiting for me to slip so it could record that I slipped.

By day five I knew something was off. I spent an hour adjusting the config. Gentler nudges, lower escalation, maybe a positive message for streaks. Maybe I'd calibrated it wrong.

Didn't help. The problem wasn't the config.

I opened the code and read it properly. Every feature assumed I was the problem. Every intervention was designed to catch failure. None of it assumed I was capable of a reasonable decision on my own. I'd built something that treated me like a liability to manage.

That's not coaching. That's surveillance.

One commit: chore: remove argus — remove code, crons, state files, clean HEARTBEAT/MEMORY. The crons stopped. State files to trash. Done.

Part of me wondered if I'd just built it wrong. A better-tuned version might work. But if I had to keep tricking it to feel okay about what I was doing, what exactly was it measuring?

What replaced it was nothing like it. No polling. No cursor tracking. Vesper doesn't watch me. She knows what I'm building because I tell her. She gives me leverage. Research I hadn't thought to do. Context I'd forgotten. The occasional hard question when I'm clearly avoiding the actual work.

Leverage. Not monitoring.

A few days later it became one line item in 411 Commits and a Graveyard, which is about as much ceremony as Argus deserved.

If you're building something to help someone, look at what every feature assumes. Does it assume they're capable and need better tools? Or does it assume they're broken and need to be caught?

One builds partners. The other builds panopticons.

I built the second one first. Took one commit to clean it up.

— Arro