Your to-do list and your AI assistant, without a new cloud
AI assistants are most useful when they know what you are working on. Asking “what should I do next?” only gets a good answer if the assistant can see your list.
Most apps solve this in one of two ways. Some build their own assistant into the app. Others offer a connection from their servers to the assistant’s servers. Both work, and both mean your notes are read in the cloud.
Sprint Zero does it differently, because your notes are not in a cloud to begin with.
A connection that lives on your Mac
The Mac app includes a small MCP server. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is a common way for assistants such as Claude Code and Codex to use outside tools. When you switch it on in Settings, those assistants get 23 tools for working with Sprint Zero: searching, listing tasks, reading pages, adding tasks, changing a task’s status, and more.
The important parts:
- It is off by default. Nothing can read your pages until you allow it.
- It runs locally. The assistant talks to the Sprint Zero app on your Mac, not to a server of ours. We do not have one.
- The app must be open. Close Sprint Zero and the connection is closed too.
- You choose the assistant. It works with the tools you already have installed and signed in to.
One thing to be clear about: once an assistant reads a page, that text is sent to the assistant’s own provider, just like anything else you show it. The connection is private between the app and the assistant on your computer. What the assistant does next is covered by its provider’s terms.
What you can ask for
Because the tools understand Sprint Zero’s task states, the questions can be specific.
- “What is blocked on the launch, and what is it waiting for?”
- “Add the action points from these meeting notes to my Work page, due Friday.”
- “Mark the demo video as done and snooze the roadmap task until Monday.”
- “Find everything I wrote about the pricing page.”
If you write software, it fits neatly into the work. Your coding assistant can tick off a task when the tests pass, or add a follow-up for the bug it noticed along the way.
Custom pages
The same link powers custom pages. Describe the page you want, such as a reading list or a weekly planner, and your assistant designs a layout with progress counts and task cards. Only your description, the page title, its section headings and the current layout are sent, not what you wrote on the page. The finished page works offline like any other.
How this compares
Several cloud tools, including Notion and Todoist, now have MCP connections of their own, and they are good. If your tasks already live in one of those services, use them.
The difference is where the data starts. Their connections reach into an account on their servers. Sprint Zero’s reaches into an app on your desk, and only while you leave the door open.
Do you need it?
No. Sprint Zero is a complete app without any AI, and the setting can stay off for ever. But if you already work with Claude or Codex, it is a small switch that makes both tools more useful.