01
Humor can reduce sterility, but trust copy must stay plain.
Portfolio productPlayable local-first prototype
Friend CRM
A tongue-in-cheek retro relationship desk with modern AI-aware workflows, local-first data, and privacy-first boundaries.
Product overview
Friend CRM helps one person remember people, promises, context, boundaries, and next moves without turning personal life into sales software.
It treats relationship memory as private, source-backed, user-owned material. The current product is a local browser prototype with fake seeded data, deterministic demo behavior, and development-only AI route shells.
The product joke
A fake bureau for people who care enough to make friendship suspiciously organized.
Early-2000s web satire with hard borders, loud labels, and fake institutional confidence.
A private intelligence desk that knows it is ridiculous and says so out loud.
Cheeky social debt language that makes the tool memorable without shaming the user.
A loud retro interface wrapped around careful, local-first product thinking.
Real boundary
The joke is fake-serious. The privacy boundary is not.
- No private message scraping.
- No automated outreach.
- No hidden scoring.
- No durable AI-generated memory without user confirmation.
- User-owned data remains exportable and deletable.
Walkthrough
The prototype is a tour through relationship memory, review, planning, and escape hatches.
People Desk
The main relationship desk: fake-serious chrome, local seeded people, scan-friendly status, and a dossier rail that keeps the joke loud while the table stays usable.
Briefing
A pre-meeting brief assembles confirmed memories, open loops, and careful next moves without pretending the machine knows the relationship better than the user.
Review Panel
AI-style extraction stays in a review lane. Suggestions can be edited, accepted, or rejected before anything becomes durable memory.
Plot Board
The Plot Board turns social intention into an explicit planning surface: not outreach automation, not pressure, just visible next moves.
Poster Lab
The loudest personality shot: BuddyScan-style fake dossier art that makes the product memorable while clearly labeling the output as decorative, not evidence.
Evidence Locker
The safety surface: export, import preview, reset, and local-data controls framed like a bureau archive but written like a responsible product.
Mobile Dossier
On narrow screens, the person rail becomes a drawer so the app stays playable instead of turning into a permanently stacked wall of panels.
Mobile Plot Board
The board keeps its relationship-planning shape on mobile, with the retro desk energy compressed into a touch-friendly layout.
Tablet Editor
Tablet QA pushed the editing surface into compact profile sections so profile changes stay legible at in-between widths.
AI and privacy
AI is a drafting assistant, not an authority. The database owns facts. AI proposes structure and language. Review is explicit.
Suggestions are source-backed and must be confirmed before they become durable memory. Public demos should run on fake data, and real provider-backed AI is not deployed as a production route yet.
Engineering notes
Built as a local-first React prototype with deterministic fallback behavior.
Vite
React
TypeScript
local browser storage
schema-versioned export/import
deterministic fallback demo behavior
server-side AI boundary for development routes
Vitest
browser/mobile/tablet regression scripts
synthetic fake-data trial harness
Design evolution
From sterile private desk to retro social bureau.
Early Friend CRM was quiet and utilitarian: a private desk for notes, memories, and next moves. Useful, but too close to a productivity dashboard.
The retro bureau direction gave the product a point of view: the frame can be absurd, the product can be careful, and the user can enjoy the contradiction without losing trust in the serious controls.
Postmortem
Personality works only because the product stays restrained where it matters.
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Review and confirmation matter more than raw AI generation.
03
Local-first is a strong prototype default for personal data.
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Browser QA catches layout issues unit tests miss.
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The product works because it balances personality and restraint.
Current status
Playable local-first prototype. Not production-hosted for real private data yet.
Fake seeded data.
Deterministic demo behavior.
Mobile, tablet, and browser QA coverage.
Development AI route shells with server-side boundaries.
Latest known commit: 6bc615f.
Hosted demo URL: not available yet.
Tags
Product designAI UXPrivacy-first softwareLocal-first prototypeReactTypeScriptBrowser QARetro interface