I've been building something that sounds like a bad idea: a program that takes over my entire screen and won't let me leave.
No alt-tab. No task switcher. No "just check one thing real quick." The window manager hands control to a kiosk compositor, and suddenly my desktop is gone. There's a browser on the left, an AI guide on the right, and nothing else. The only way out is through.
cage -- electron focus-flowThat's it. One command and my computer becomes a single-purpose machine.
Here's why I built it: I don't have a discipline problem. I have an environment problem. Every productivity system I've tried assumes you'll just... choose to stay focused. But choice is the whole issue. The moment you can switch tabs, you will. Not because you're lazy. Because your brain is running a background process that's always scanning for something more interesting. You can't beat that with willpower. You beat it by removing the option.
So I removed the option.
The kiosk compositor is a real thing — it's what ATMs and airport check-in screens use. It runs one application fullscreen and disables all the escape hatches. I'm using it on my personal Linux machine. Voluntarily. To trap myself in front of the thing I need to do.
The AI piece is what makes it more than a screen lock. The right panel watches what's happening in the browser and offers context. It's not autocomplete. It's more like having someone sitting next to you who's already read everything you're about to read and can point out what matters. The AI doesn't do the work — it shortens the distance between "staring at a blank page" and "knowing what to type."
I'm still building this. The first version is rough — Electron split pane, Playwright piping browser state to Claude through a subprocess. It's held together with duct tape and child processes. But it works. I sat down yesterday, launched it, and finished something I'd been avoiding for three days. Not because I was motivated. Because I literally couldn't do anything else.
There's something freeing about removing your own choices. Sounds backwards. Isn't.
I have ideas for where this goes next — different modes, queued sessions, a timer that tells you when you've earned your desktop back. But the core insight is already proven: the most productive version of my computer is the one that does less.