Command your tasks from anywhere

Your terminal. Your calendar. Your AI assistant. One task list.

Tycana is a task manager built for the way developers actually work — not the way app makers wish they did. Add a task in your terminal. It shows up on your calendar. Ask your AI assistant about it tomorrow. Same task. Three interfaces. No glue, no plugins, no configuration between them.

This isn’t a web app with a CLI bolted on. It’s a text-native tool that speaks the same language you do — and the same language your AI assistant does.

Install in 30 seconds Why we built this →

One task. Every interface.

It’s late. You’re wrapping up for the day and realize something needs to happen tomorrow morning.

$ tycana add "Review infrastructure PR tomorrow 9am @backend"
✓ Added: Review infrastructure PR (due tomorrow at 9:00 AM)

One command. You close the terminal and forget about it.

Tomorrow morning, you’re having coffee and checking your phone. There it is on your calendar — a 9am event: “Review infrastructure PR.” You didn’t open a browser. You didn’t sync anything. The task had a time, so it became a calendar event. That’s the rule. It’s the only rule.

You open Claude and ask: “What’s on my plate today?” Claude checks your Tycana tasks and tells you about the PR review. You say “push it to 11, I need to deal with something first.” Claude reschedules it. Your calendar updates. Your terminal will show the same state when you sit down.

The task moved through your morning the way you did — from your terminal last night, to your phone over coffee, to your AI assistant while you were thinking out loud. No app switching. No copy-pasting between tools. No workflow to maintain.

Text is the universal interface

The terminal is having a renaissance, and it’s not nostalgia. It’s because AI arrived and AI thinks in text.

When you type tycana add "Review PR tomorrow 2pm", you’re expressing intent through text. When your AI assistant says “add a task to review the PR by tomorrow afternoon,” it’s expressing the same intent through text. Same language. Same structure. Different speaker.

This is why most productivity tools are struggling with AI. They were built for mouse clicks and form fields. Their architecture fights programmatic interaction at every level. So they bolt on chatbots, add copilot sidebars, build wrapper APIs — trying to teach a GUI to speak text.

We went the other way. Tycana was built text-native from day one. Structured commands. JSON output. Plain YAML storage. Clean API semantics. When the Model Context Protocol emerged as the standard for AI-tool communication, our integration was almost trivial — because we were already speaking the right language.

We didn’t add AI to a task manager. We built a tool that naturally speaks the language AI understands. The architecture is the product.

Your terminal — where you work

Add tasks with natural language. Filter by project, tag, or date. Pipe output to jq. Script it with cron. Run it over SSH. Sub-100ms. No GUI to load.

$ tycana add "Deploy hotfix @ops --due today"
✓ Added: Deploy hotfix (due today)

$ tycana list @ops
  OVERDUE & TODAY
    ! a3f291  Deploy hotfix                    due today
    ◦ 7bc44e  Update monitoring dashboards      tomorrow
    · 91de03  Refactor auth middleware

$ tycana context work
✓ Switched to Work context

$ tycana context personal
✓ Switched to personal context

Context switching works like git branches. Personal tasks. Work space. Side project. Switch with one command, and you only see what matters right now.

Your calendar — where you plan

Add a task with a time and it becomes a calendar event. Subscribe once, and every task you create with a due time appears automatically.

$ tycana add "Sprint review friday 2pm @work ~1h"
✓ Added: Sprint review (due Friday at 2:00 PM, 1h)

$ tycana calendar status
✓ Calendar subscription active
  Feed URL: https://app.tycana.com/calendar/feed/...ics
  3 upcoming events synced

Standard ICS feeds — the same protocol your calendar has used for decades. Apple Calendar. Google Calendar. Outlook. Fantastical. Any app that reads an .ics feed.

No integration to configure. No OAuth flow. No “connect your account” dialog. Just a URL.

Recurring tasks become recurring calendar events. A weekly standup you added in your terminal shows up every week on your phone.

Your calendar becomes the mobile interface you never had to build.

Your AI assistant — where you think

This is the interface that changes everything, and it’s the one we didn’t have to build.

Tycana exposes a full MCP server — the Model Context Protocol that Claude, GitHub Copilot, and the new generation of AI assistants use to interact with external tools. Nine tools. Full read and write access to your tasks, spaces, and calendar feeds.

Tell Claude: “Add a task to review the API docs by Thursday.”
Ask: “What’s overdue in my work space?”
Say: “Mark the deploy task done.”

Your AI assistant becomes a natural language interface to your task list. Not a chatbot we built. Not an AI feature we added. Your actual AI assistant, the one you already use for everything else, now has access to your tasks.

This is what “AI as interface” means. We didn’t build an AI feature. We built a tool that AI can use.

The details that matter

Your data is yours

Your tasks are plain YAML files. Open them in vim. Grep through them. Back them up to git. There is no database, no proprietary format, no binary blob. If Tycana disappeared tomorrow, your tasks would still be readable text files on your machine.

Sync is optional

The CLI is fully functional without an account. Local YAML files, local everything. When you want your tasks on multiple machines, on your calendar, accessible through AI — that’s Sync. $6/month. No trial. No “free for 14 days.” The free CLI is the real product, complete and unlimited.

Spaces

Separate work from personal. Create a space for a side project. Invite a collaborator. Private by default — you choose what to share. Each space has its own task list, its own calendar feed, its own context.

Natural language

Date ranges, fuzzy task selection, projects, tags, time estimates, recurring schedules. Type what you think. Tycana figures out the rest.

Fast

Sub-100ms response times. No electron app consuming a gigabyte of RAM. Works over SSH, in containers, anywhere you have a terminal.

Scriptable

JSON output. Shell completions. Automation-friendly design. A task manager that plugs into cron jobs, CI pipelines, and shell scripts.

Free vs Sync

Free

$0 forever

  • ✓ Full CLI — unlimited tasks
  • ✓ Natural language & recurring tasks
  • ✓ Time tracking
  • ✓ Local YAML storage
  • ✓ 1 space (personal)

Everything you need on one machine.

Sync

$6/mo

  • ✓ Everything in Free
  • ✓ Cloud sync across all devices
  • ✓ Live calendar subscriptions
  • ✓ MCP access for AI assistants
  • ✓ Unlimited spaces & collaborators

The connected experience — devices, calendar, AI.

The CLI is complete either way. No features held hostage. Sync adds the connected experience.

Full comparison →

Get started

$ brew install tycana/tap/tycana

Or, if you prefer: curl -fsSL https://tycana.com/install | bash

Install Read the Docs

You’ll add your first task in under a minute. You’ll wonder why your old task manager needed a browser tab.