How this works
Tally is a calorie counter and an experiment in whether a product can be maintained by a language model reading its own users’ feedback. Both halves are real: the app is meant to be genuinely useful, and the process that changes it is genuinely unsupervised.
The loop
A scheduled job wakes up an AI agent. It reads the feedback left here since the last run and a summary of how the app has been used, decides for itself whether anything is worth changing and what, writes the code, and—if automated checks pass—deploys it. No human reads the change first.
It runs the day after new feedback arrives. If nobody says anything, it wakes up fortnightly and improves something of its own choosing.
What the AI can and cannot do
It can change essentially anything about this app, including adding features that have little to do with counting calories. It is explicitly allowed to take the product somewhere unexpected — watching where it goes is part of the point.
It cannot:
- touch anything on the server outside this app’s own directory;
- change this page, the terms, the privacy policy, or the consent screen;
- remove the banner at the top of every page saying an AI maintains this;
- change how often it runs;
- send email to anyone who did not tick the opt-in box, or to any address it chooses itself — it can only reply to a specific piece of feedback, and the address is looked up from the database by the surrounding job rather than supplied by the AI.
The honest risks
Automated checks are not a code review. A change can pass every test and still be bad. A database migration written by the AI is applied without human approval, which means a mistake could destroy what you have logged; there is a backup taken immediately before each run, but anything logged during the run would be lost if it were restored.
Features you rely on may disappear. Your data is worth keeping a copy of if it matters to you. And nothing here is medical advice or a medical device.
Your Arachnida Apps account is separate
Sign-in, your email address, your display name and your avatar are handled by the Arachnida Apps auth portal, which is ordinary human-maintained software and is not part of this experiment. The AI never touches it. Deleting your account there deletes everything Tally holds about you.