I wanted one place to actually work instead of tab-switching between Notion, Slack, GitHub, Gmail, and a calendar all day. Most "productivity dashboards" are either static widget boards or chatbots that only talk — never both. I wanted an AI that could see our tasks, notes, and calendar and take real action across the tools we already use, not just summarize them. The name RELABS came from wanting a "re-lab" for how we organize a workday: movable, personal, and connected, with an AI command bar sitting at the center instead of buried in a sidebar chat panel.
RELABS is a command-center dashboard: draggable, resizable widgets for tasks, notes, calendar, and connected apps (Notion, GitHub, Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar) sit on a glassmorphic dark UI. Every widget works standalone with direct clicks — no AI required. A persistent command bar lets you type natural language ("add a task," "summarize my week," "reply to Sarah on Slack") and an LLM with tool-use picks the right action, executes it for real against Supabase or the connected app, and updates the widget live. Every action is logged to a transparent, timestamped activity feed.
Next.js App Router + TypeScript on the frontend, with Supabase for Google SSO, Postgres, and row-level-secured data. React Grid Layout powers the draggable dashboard. Pica's AuthKit handles third-party OAuth connections and exposes their APIs as callable tools. An LLM tool-use loop (add_task, complete_task, summarize_week, plus dynamically-added integration tools once an app is connected) drives the command bar, executing against Supabase directly and against Pica for integrations. I hand-built the design system — Inter font, compact type scale, one accent color, hairline glass cards — rather than pulling a component library, to keep the whole app visually consistent.
The gnarliest issue was a dependency mismatch: @supabase/ssr and @supabase/supabase-js fell out of sync after an npm audit fix --force, which silently downgraded Next.js and React too and collapsed every Supabase query's types to never across 20+ files. It looked like a code bug for hours before I traced it to package versions. Beyond that, getting drag/resize, persisted layouts, and live Pica-sourced widgets to feel cohesive (not like three bolted-together demos) took real iteration, as did making the AI's tool-use loop reliably multi-step for cross-app commands like "add my Notion deadline to my calendar."
I'm proud that the command bar doesn't just answer questions — it actually writes to Supabase and connected apps, with every action traceable in a real activity log, which was a hard requirement I didn't compromise on. I'm also proud of the design system: a genuinely restrained glassmorphic UI with one accent color and no template-default feel, applied consistently across eight pages. And after a rough dependency-hell detour, I came out the other side with a clean, fully type-checked, RLS-secured codebase instead of papering over the errors.
Tool-use architecture is easiest to reason about when core actions (tasks, notes) and integration actions (Pica-backed) share one schema and one execution path, rather than special-casing integrations. I also relearned a very old lesson the hard way: never run npm audit fix --force on a project with tightly version-coupled packages — it can silently break peer dependencies across your whole stack. And on the design side, constraints (one accent color, a capped type scale, no gradients on cards) made the UI feel more premium than giving ourselves more visual freedom would have.
Wiring live Pica connection keys end-to-end so the Notion, GitHub, Slack, and Gmail widgets pull real data instead of architecture-ready placeholders is the immediate next step, along with persisting habit tracking (currently the one widget without a Supabase table). Longer term: smarter cross-app command chaining, a mobile-friendly layout mode, richer insights that run on a schedule instead of only on-demand, and letting users define their own custom widgets and command-bar shortcuts on top of the same tool-use framework I've already built.