Coding with AI agents creates this peculiar problem: you get these short 10-30 second waits while the model thinks, and it's just long enough to lose focus. Not long enough to context switch to something meaningful, but long enough to reflexively check HN, Twitter, or that Teams notification. Context switching and losing my 'main thread' of work has been getting to me recently.

I needed a dead-simple timer. Something that fades the screen, counts up or down, minimal distractions. I know many existeed, but I wanted to see how far I can get with app building tools and my own set of requirements.

GitHub Spark: surprisingly good

I've been testing various AI UI builders lately: v0.dev, Base44, Replit Agent, and now GitHub Spark. For this particular use case, Spark the winner in terms of looks and 'lift and shift' to my existing (netlify) deployment flow.

Here's what I asked for:

• Minimal timer that can count up or down
• Screen fade/overlay when active
• Task queue functionality
• Clean, distraction-free design

Within minutes, Spark generated a working app that looked good out of the box. Not "AI-generated good" but actually good.

For deployment, I simply dropped in a netlify.toml, pointed focus.jakobs.dev at it, and it just worked. No build config wrestling, no deployment pipeline setup. From idea to live app in under 20 minutes.

That's it.

Personalised tools

After building this, I found Pomodoro Technique is basically the same concept. There are probably 500 similar apps already. However, the main point is that building personalized tools for hyper-specific needs is becoming trivial.

Try it: focus.jakobs.dev