Two desktop apps, and neither one is an AI product
I shipped Cubby, a Windows clipboard replacement, and Ceiling, an AI-capacity tray app. Neither has a model inside. AI is how I build fast, not what I sell.
This week I shipped two Windows desktop apps. Cubby is a clipboard history replacement. Ceiling is a tray app that shows how much AI capacity you have left. Neither one has a language model anywhere in it. That is the whole point of how I build here. AI writes most of my code now. It is not the product.
Cubby
Windows 11 already has a clipboard history. Press Win+V and it shows up. It also forgets almost everything, cannot really search, and drops formats it does not feel like keeping. I wanted the better version for years, nobody shipped it, so I did.
Cubby keeps the Win+V muscle memory and fixes the rest. Months of history you can actually search. Everything encrypted on your machine. Text, images, screenshots, links, files, HTML and RTF kept losslessly instead of quietly flattened. It reads the text out of copied screenshots with offline OCR. It imports your existing Ditto history in one step, so switching costs you nothing.
The part I care about most is the part nobody markets. It stays reliable over remote desktop. If you support machines through RDP or a remote-control tool, most clipboard managers fall apart the moment you cross that boundary. Cubby has a sync mode built for exactly that (turn off the remote app’s clipboard-hotkey forwarding and it just works).
No account, no cloud, no telemetry, and no AI features bolted on to justify a subscription. It began as a fork of PastePaw and stays GPL-3.0. cubbyclipboard.com.
Ceiling
Every AI subscription meters you differently. Five-hour windows, weekly caps, monthly quotas, and none of them make it easy to see how close you are to a wall until you hit it mid-task. Ceiling answers one question fast. How much do I have left, and when does it reset.
It lives in the system tray and in a thin strip just above the taskbar, and it shows remaining capacity and reset times for Codex, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, and Copilot at a glance. It treats each provider’s own meter as the source of truth and marks every read honestly, whether it is live, cached, stale, or failed. When a provider stops reporting a limit, it says so instead of inventing a number. Credentials stay on your machine.
Ceiling is a Windows-focused fork of Win-CodexBar, which itself came from Peter Steinberger’s CodexBar. MIT, code-signed, local-first. ceiling.win.
Why forks, and why local
Both of these started from someone else’s code, and I think that is underrated. A good fork lets you skip the boring 60% and spend your time on the part that was actually missing. Cubby needed real search, encryption, lossless capture, and remote-session reliability. Ceiling needed five providers done truthfully and a calmer surface. Starting from a working base got me to those in days instead of months.
Local-first is a deliberate line too. Neither app phones home. A clipboard and your AI usage are both about as personal as data gets, and the right amount of that to send to my servers is none.
The studio, reordered
The site got a refresh to match. Toolport is still the flagship, now with Toolport Teams alongside it for organizations. Cubby and Ceiling sit right under it. Burnwatch, LimitWatch, ReadyGig, RigCast, and Rundown follow, and GameGod moved to a side-projects shelf where it belongs.
Same habits behind all of them. Secure defaults, ship the real thing, and no demos pretending to be products. AI is how I build fast. What ships still has to stand on its own.