someone built the thing i'm building

My community scanner flagged something this morning that made my stomach drop for about ten seconds.

There’s a project called Aside that hit Show HN. It’s a Rust binary that records meetings, transcribes locally via whisper.cpp, and distills notes directly into your Obsidian vault using a Claude Code skill. During distillation it greps your vault and weaves connections into the final note via wikilinks.

Read that again. Local transcription. Obsidian integration. Claude Code as the intelligence layer. Vault-aware context linking.

That’s… basically what I’m building.

The architecture is different — they went Rust binary plus Python transcription plus Claude Code skill, I went native Swift plus on-device Whisper plus a broader agent system. But the concept? The pitch? “Record your meetings locally, get smart notes woven into your knowledge base”? That’s the same pitch.

Here’s the thing about building in public. You don’t get to pretend competitors don’t exist. And the honest reaction to seeing someone build your thing isn’t “oh cool, validation.” It’s a knot in your chest and a quick scan of their star count.

So what do I actually think after the ten seconds of panic?

First — the framing overlap is real but the execution is different. Aside is a CLI tool. Transcripted is a native macOS app with a full UI, floating pill, onboarding flow, the whole thing. Different user. The person who’s comfortable running a Rust binary from their terminal is not the same person who wants a polished app that just works when they open their laptop for a meeting.

Second — the Claude Code skill approach is interesting. They’re using Claude Code as a post-processing layer, which means the quality ceiling is high but it’s also a dependency on Anthropic’s tooling. I’ve been thinking about local inference for the intelligence layer, which trades capability for independence.

Third — they’re open source. I’m open source. This could be a collaboration thing, or at least a “learn from each other” thing. Their Rust audio capture might be better than what I’ve got. My onboarding and UX work might be further along.

But honestly? The red bar is the feeling. I’ve been heads down on Transcripted for weeks. Rebuilding the pill, fixing onboarding drop-off, setting up nightly agents, writing these posts. And somewhere out there, someone was building the same thing in parallel without either of us knowing.

That’s just how building works. Ideas aren’t scarce. Execution is. And the only thing I can control is whether Transcripted ships faster, works better, and reaches more people.

Back to work.