Star Journal

Star Journal started from a simple question: what if your thoughts didn't just pile up in a list, but connected to each other? Every entry becomes a star, and as themes recur across your writing, the stars form constellations.

The part I cared most about was making those connections feel alive. As you write, the app matches your new thoughts against past entries in real time and shows what they link to, right there in the editor. Doing that on save would have been far simpler, but I wanted you to feel your thinking connect as it happens, rather than after the fact.

I built it on Dreamer, an agent platform where apps call tools and run background work through a "Sidekick". I designed how the matching should behave and tuned the engine with AI rather than hand-writing the algorithm myself, which is part of what let me take it from idea to working app quickly. It was later featured in Dreamer's marketing and demoed within Meta as an example of what people build when given personal-AI tooling.

Under the hood

• Real-time matching that surfaces related past entries as you type, each connection described in plain language (e.g. "shared concept: dictation")
• A weighted matching engine with LLM post-processing on save, connection blacklists, and graded connection strengths
• Background processing via Dreamer's Sidekick, so analysis never blocks the writing UI
• An interactive star-map visualisation where entries are stars and recurring themes pull them into constellations
• Frontend/server split, with all persistent state held on the server