Humble beginnings

Nucleate is the product of months of building, tuning, testing—and re-inventing.

Is a transcription and summarization app all that hard to make? Not really.

Did I manage to make it hard anyway? Absolutely!

All told, Nucleate has been written (or rewritten) three times.

The first version was a backend-only set of scripts: a simple pipeline that transcribed my Obsidian audio notes and produced short summaries. It worked—but only for me. No UI, no flexibility, no ambition beyond “get text out.”

The second version became a Tkinter-based tray app. This is where Nucleate started to feel like a product instead of a script. Customization appeared. Early “special notes” were introduced (the early version of today’s Insights). Tagging, config management, and basic AI engine flexibility followed.

This phase forced a lot of “responsible developer” growth—cleaner data handling, fewer assumptions, better structure. At the time, I genuinely thought this version (then called Echo) might ship as a small, focused devlog tool.

And yet, scope creep…

The third version was a full reset. As features expanded, Tkinter stopped being the right foundation. I migrated the app to PySide6 and rebranded the project from Echo to Nucleate. What I thought was a “finished” app was actually noodle after noodle of spaghetti code.

Only after this third iteration did the app really start to mature. Deep customization, a full suite of Insights, diarization, cross-platform support, automated setup flows, proper error handling, state management, in-app recording, and far more flexibility than the original vision allowed. Content and customization blossomed.

Nucleate isn’t the result of chasing features—it’s the result of chasing clarity.

And now, here we are. Nucleate is entering beta—and for the first time, it feels ready to be shared.

Development stats

I like data! See the stats that went into Nucleate pre-release.

Git commits

See heat map of git commits vs time.

Lines of Code

See figure of lines of code vs time.

Logged Dev hours

See clockify number of logged hours.