Helm

Personal tool · self-hosted · no public sign-up

One inbox for every side project you're running.

Helm watches the GitHub repos behind your side projects and turns their activity into a single, day-grouped inbox: what shipped, what broke, what's gone quiet, and what still needs you.

It's a private instance one person runs for themselves, with a short allowlist of GitHub accounts permitted to sign in. There's no hosted product and nothing to install from a store.

GitHub: OAuth sign-in & repo sync Supabase: database, auth, storage OpenAI: chat agent
See what lands in the inbox Support
Helm inbox screen showing a day-grouped list: a daily summary, a sync error, a stale-project notice, a task assignment, and a release, each labelled with its project and a relative time.
Sample inbox with invented project names and timestamps. Not a real account.

The inbox

Every project reports into one list, grouped by day.

A daily job syncs each active repo, then Helm decides what's worth surfacing. Nothing shows up just because something happened; it shows up because it changed a project's state.

Daily / weekly summary

A written recap of what moved on a project since the last one: commits, closed tasks, open pull requests.

daily 05:00 · weekly Mon 06:00

Sync error

The GitHub sync for a project failed, usually an expired or revoked token that needs reconnecting in Settings.

on failure

Stale project

A project marked Building or Beta has had no activity for 14 days straight.

daily check

Task assigned

Someone assigned a task on the project board to you.

on assignment

Task due

A task on the board is coming up on, or has passed, its due date.

daily check

Idle pull request

An open pull request hasn't been updated in 3 days.

daily check

Release

A new GitHub release or tag was published for a synced repo.

on publish

The 14-day stale rule and the 3-day idle-PR window only apply to Building and Beta projects. A project you've paused or archived is expected to sit quietly.

The project board

Behind every inbox item is one project's page.

Each project moves through a fixed set of stages, keeps its own three-column task board, notes, docs, and an activity feed built from the same GitHub sync that feeds the inbox.

  • Idea
  • Building
  • Beta
  • Live
  • Paused
  • Archived
orbitctl · Task boardsample data

To do (2)

Write release notes
Add CSV export for task boardopen

Doing (1)

Fix crash on resume after background uploaddue soon

Done (1)

Set up TestFlight beta groupwas overdue

Cards move with drag-and-drop or plain buttons, so the board works with JavaScript off. Each project also keeps notes, markdown docs, and a contributor list drawn straight from GitHub commit authorship.

Under the hood

What it's built on, and why that's not a secret.

This isn't a packaged product, so its dependencies are part of what it is rather than an implementation detail worth hiding.

Runtime
A SvelteKit app deployed to Vercel, with two Vercel cron jobs (daily and weekly) driving the sync and summary work.
Data
Supabase Postgres holds projects, tasks, notes, docs, releases, and inbox events behind row-level security.
Sign-in
GitHub OAuth against a short allowlist of accounts added by hand in Settings; anyone else's GitHub login is turned away.
Repo sync
Each project's GitHub token pulls commits, pull requests, issues, and releases into Postgres on a schedule.
Chat
A chat panel backed by an OpenAI account (connected per user, ChatGPT-plan aware) drives an agent with read-only tools over the synced data.

Sample · asked in the chat panel

“What changed this week?”

  • Reads back recent commits, open pull requests, and closed tasks for the project
  • Can draft release notes from merged PRs and commits since the last tag
  • Can list issues, releases, and cross-project status on request

Support

Questions about Helm

Helm isn't a public product with a sign-up flow or a support queue, but if something here needs clarifying, get in touch directly.