Some tools find their purpose late
← All postsSome tools find their purpose late. This one took ten years.
Last week I picked up a Node CLI repo I hadn’t touched since 2016. I’d just shipped another project with Claude Code and wanted to see how it handled a real legacy codebase. Three hours later: a genuinely better tool, a clean conscience, and a closed tab full of issues and PRs from people I never got back to. Decent open source citizen, finally.
Halfway through the planning phase I hit a wall that turned out to be a door. Google had switched their Keep export format to clean JSON. The whole HTML-scraping approach was dead in the water. I had to take a beat and reflect on my life choices.
Modernizing toward a dead purpose felt like painting a room you’re about to demolish. So I stopped and asked the more useful question: what should this actually do now?
The answer came fast: Markdown. One file per note, with frontmatter, checkboxes, tags. Exactly the format that tools like Obsidian run on. What started as a personal quality-of-life hack now slots into the knowledge management workflows that people are building their AI-assisted thinking around. I did not see that coming when I sat down to fix some failing tests.
There’s a lesson in there about patience. Some hacks don’t need fixing. They just need time to become irrelevant in the right direction.
The tool is live on npm as v2.0.0. I ran it against 1067 of my own notes to make sure it actually works. If you’re sitting on a Google Keep export and want out, it’s one install away.