daybook-mcp

Local-first tooling for logging daily activities and generating daily summaries, weekly article ideas, and platform-specific social posts from those logs — through Claude.

Single-user, no hosting, no auth. Storage is a single SQLite file at ~/.daybook/daybook.db, created on first run.

This is an npm workspaces monorepo with three packages:

• packages/core — @daybook/core. The shared SQLite schema, queries, voice loading, and platform tone rules. Not used directly; both interfaces below depend on it.

• packages/mcp-server — daybook-mcp, a stdio MCP server. Register it once with your MCP host and its tools show up automatically — but the host has to be restarted to pick up a newly registered server.

• packages/skill — @daybook/skill, a Claude Code Skill that exposes the identical functionality through a small bundled CLI instead of MCP tool calls. Loads instantly via the Skill tool, no restart needed. Same database, same schema — use whichever fits your session.

Setup

npm install
npm run build

This builds all three packages (core first, since the other two depend on it).

Related MCP server: claude-journal

Using the MCP server

Register it with Claude Code:

claude mcp add daybook -- node /path/to/daybook-mcp/packages/mcp-server/dist/index.js

This writes the server entry into Claude Code's own config — ~/.claude.json under this project's entry, not a file in this repo — so there's nothing to commit for it, unlike the skill's .claude/skills/daybook symlink (see "Using the skill" below).

Or add to Claude Desktop's claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "daybook": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/path/to/daybook-mcp/packages/mcp-server/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Note: MCP hosts load registered servers at session startup, so after registering (or after packages/mcp-server code changes and a rebuild), start a new session before the tools appear.

Using the skill

The repo ships a symlink at .claude/skills/daybook pointing at packages/skill, so if you clone this repo and open it in Claude Code, the skill is auto-discovered — no registration step. To use it from a different project, copy or symlink packages/skill into that project's own .claude/skills/<name>/ directory instead.

Either way, once it's built (npm run build, which also builds the CLI to packages/skill/scripts/cli.js), it's available immediately — no restart.

Usage

Once either interface is set up, just talk to Claude normally. You don't need to name tools or commands — describe what you want:

• "Log that I fixed the flaky auth test today" — logs an activity note.

• "What did I get done this week?" — fetches raw entries for a range.

• "Summarize my day" — pulls today's entries, drafts a short recap in your configured voice, and stores it.

• "Draft a tweet about today" / "turn this week into a LinkedIn post" — pulls the relevant entries/summaries, drafts a post following that platform's tone rules, and stores it as a draft for your review.

• "Show me my drafts" / "mark draft 3 as posted" — list and update stored drafts.

• "Give me a weekly review" — reads the last 7 days of summaries and proposes the single strongest article angle from the week, as a title + bullet outline. This is exploratory and is never saved automatically.

Because the generation tools are two-phase (see below), you'll see Claude fetch material first, draft the text itself in your voice, then store it — rather than a black box handing back finished text. That's deliberate: you can watch it happen and redirect mid-draft if the tone is off.

Proactive milestone suggestions

You don't have to remember to ask for a post. Whenever something logged represents a completed feature, a resolved hard problem, a shipped release, or another genuine milestone — not routine progress — Claude is instructed to flag it and tell you, unprompted, that it seems worth a post: which platform fits and why, in a line or two. It then waits for you to say yes before drafting anything, and it never posts on your behalf — copying, editing, and actually publishing the finished draft stays entirely your call.

This works the same way in both interfaces: the MCP server advertises it as standing server instructions (plus in log_entry's own description), and the skill carries the identical guidance in SKILL.md. Milestone entries are stored with a flag (milestone: true / --milestone) so they also surface prominently — marked ★ MILESTONE — in generate_post material and in weekly_review, which weighs them heavily when picking the week's strongest angle. You can also flag something as a milestone after the fact with flag_milestone / flag-milestone <entry_id>, if its significance only becomes clear later.

Tools / commands

Both interfaces expose the same nine operations:

• log_entry / log — log a raw activity note. Accepts an optional milestone flag for genuinely significant work (see above).

• flag_milestone / flag-milestone — retroactively mark an existing entry as a milestone.

• get_entries / entries — fetch raw entries in a date range.

• generate_daily_summary / summary — two-phase: call without the drafted text to get the day's entries plus drafting instructions; call again with the text to store it.

• generate_post / post — two-phase, same pattern. Platform is x, medium, or linkedin, each with its own tone rules.

• list_drafts / drafts — list stored drafts, optionally filtered by draft/posted.

• mark_posted / mark-posted — flip a draft's status to posted.

• weekly_review / review — pulls the last 7 days of summaries and asks you to identify the week's strongest article angle as an outline. Nothing is stored; the outline is just the reply.

The two-phase design exists because MCP's server-initiated "sampling" isn't yet supported by Claude Code or Claude Desktop — so instead of the server calling an LLM itself (which would need a separate API key), the tool hands back the raw material and lets the Claude you're already talking to do the writing, then a second call persists it.

Voice

Edit voice.md at the repo root to tune the authorial voice used across summaries and posts — both interfaces read from the same file. Platform-specific tone rules (length, formality) live in packages/core/src/prompts.ts.

Why Node, not Bun

better-sqlite3's native binding doesn't load under Bun's runtime yet. The project uses Node instead (Node 22+ can run the TypeScript sources directly via node --experimental-strip-types, or build with npm run build and run the compiled output).

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — bug fixes, new platform tone rules, additional commands, whatever's useful. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the project layout, dev setup, and how to keep the MCP server and the skill in sync when adding a capability.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.