Suggested habits

Beyond habits you teach by hand, Plainwork watches for repeated patterns in how you work and suggests automating them.

Currently turned off

Auto habit detection is disabled for general use temporarily. Nothing is mined for patterns in the meantime unless you request for access, and no suggestions appear on the home screen. Everything else is unaffected, so you can still teach a habit, and the habits you already have keep running on their schedule.

You'll see a notice on the home screen and under Settings → General. Both have a Request access button, so ask if you want detection turned on for your account.

The rest of this article describes how detection works when it's on.

How suggestions appear

When Plainwork notices you doing the same sequence often, it shows a system notification and lists the suggestion in the detected section on the home screen, with how many times it's seen it. Each new suggestion notifies you once, never repeatedly.

• automate — build the habit for you. Plainwork does the task once, live, to learn the exact steps (see below).
• ignore — dismiss the suggestion.

Privacy

Detection runs entirely on your device, on what it recorded — your clicks and their control labels, the content involved (file names, entered text), window changes, and app switches — so it can tell two routines in the same app apart. Detection itself sends nothing anywhere. Only when you pick automate does Plainwork send the captured example runs behind that one suggestion to the AI model that builds the habit. You can pause recording or clear captured data at any time — see Recording & your data.

Turning a suggestion into a habit

Picking automate builds the habit automatically:

1. Plainwork sends the captured runs behind the suggestion — the steps you took, with the real file names and text involved, plus the step screenshots taken as you worked — to the model, which works out the intent: what stays the same every time, and what varies (a new file each week, a date in the message).
2. Plainwork then runs the task once, live, driving the apps involved — you watch it work. Nothing irreversible (sending, deleting) happens on this first run; those steps are only recorded.
3. You get the same review as a taught habit: the steps, which folders it can read, and a schedule. It doesn't run on its own until you save.

A suggestion doesn't need a name to be approved — the habit is titled for you after it's built. If Plainwork can't reproduce the task automatically, it offers to let you demonstrate it instead, dropping you into the teach flow with the goal filled in.