Making “Nucleate”
Talk about anything and everything
In 2025, I started Watchlight — a small studio focused on building video games and software for small teams. It didn’t take long to realize I needed a better way to track projects: something that helped me move faster, identify weaknesses, and keep momentum without constant overhead.
If you’ve worked in the real world, you probably recognize what I’m describing: a project manager. Someone who keeps things on track, maintains visibility into progress, and publishes status updates. That role is incredibly valuable — and it’s common in well-resourced teams.
For solo founders and small businesses, though, being your own project manager is hard. Writing updates, remembering everything that’s in flight, and regularly reflecting on progress is time-consuming and mentally expensive. Worse, the time spent organizing and documenting often costs more than it gives back. It’s an unfair reality — and a real barrier for people building on their own.
So I did something about it and built “Nucleate.”
To me, Nucleate is a personal, private, AI-based project manager. I wanted something that reduced the mental load of tracking progress, next steps, and loose ends — without asking me to constantly “check in” with it. I wanted a solution that was private too. My data stays on my machine, no strings attached and no subscriptions required. I don’t like games that are ‘pay-to-play’ and feel similarly about subscription software.
To you, Nucleate can be whatever you need it to be.
Don’t craft, just talk
At its core, Nucleate is a tray application that transcribes audio and writes summaries. I realized it was faster and more natural to talk through my work than to sit down and write everything out.
Most people speak at around 150 words per minute. The average typing speed is closer to 40 — and that assumes you already know what to write. After drafting, proofreading, and formatting, this page alone was drafted at <4 WPH. Talking is easier. Thinking out loud is natural. And large language models are surprisingly good at making sense of rough, unpolished speech.
With Nucleate, you just talk. It handles the rest.
Nucleate converts audio files (.mp3, .mp4, .wav, .m4a) into Markdown notes containing summaries, upscaled insights, and full transcripts. Disjointed ideas begin to coalesce. Topics are grouped, tagged, and optionally passed through a set of focused analyses that turn raw dialogue into higher-value notes.
Over time, Nucleate also pays attention to patterns. It looks week-over-week and month-over-month to identify milestones, recurring blockers, and forward-looking themes. From that, it automatically produces digests and structured reports on a regular cadence — without requiring you to manage or curate them manually.
Designed for customization
I built Nucleate to be highly modular so people with different goals, projects, and interests can make it their own. Out of the box, it includes more than 20 user modes designed for software developers, small business owners, students, program managers, and personal users who simply want to track progress and goals. The list keeps growing.
For everyone else, Nucleate lets you build your own mode from scratch. An astronaut passionate about extraterrestrial agriculture? You’re covered, Mark Watney.
If you’re an inventor, an engineer, a social service worker, a therapist, a D&D nut, a bedtime-story reader, a college student… it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re passionate about. Just start talking.
“Insights” are one of the most powerful parts of Nucleate. There are over 45 distinct Insights, covering everything from key points and decisions to bug tracking, progress summaries, stakeholder feedback, and more. Each built-in user mode comes preconfigured with notes I thought would be useful, but you can mix and match freely.
Too many options? Enable Smart Insights. This optional pre-pass analyzes your summaries and automatically selects the most relevant note types for the content.
Alongside the automated workflow, I also built the Lab. The Lab is a sandbox for one-off transcription, summarization, and experimentation. You can try different user modes, notes, and models without disrupting your main workflow. I personally use it to summarize work from my day job — a separate space from Watchlight Studio. Like user modes, Lab profiles are fully customizable.
Designed for enthusiasts
I designed Nucleate to run on my own machine first — to preserve privacy and protect intellectual property. Audio logs, transcripts, and summaries stay local and under my control.
That said, Nucleate also supports API-based services. If configured, both transcription and summarization can run through OpenAI models, removing the need for high-end hardware. The results can be excellent, but it does mean your data leaves your machine — a tradeoff some users are comfortable with.
Nucleate integrates cleanly with both Obsidian and Notion. Obsidian can be used fully offline, aligning well with a privacy-first workflow. Notion is cloud-based and requires an internet connection, but offers a familiar and flexible workspace for many users.
This project has been a joy to build, and Nucleate has become a core part of my own projects and business. Nucleate Pro is available on Gumroad and Itch and runs on both Windows and Mac. If you just want to try it out, the core Nucleate experience is free with limited functionality.