It logs what you do on your device, finds the sequences that keep coming back, shows you the steps before it touches anything, then runs them in the apps you already have installed.
Plainwork keeps a local log of which app you were in and what you did there. That log is written to an encrypted database on your disk and read by a process on your device. No frames, no clicks, and no keystrokes are uploaded.
Every ten minutes, Plainwork mines the last seven days of that log for repeated sequences. A pattern has to run three or more times and have at least three meaningful steps before it counts. Anything shorter or rarer is noise, and stays buried.
A proposal is not a black box. You see every step it plans to take, where each one came from, and which ones will pause for you. Approve it, edit any step, or dismiss it and it never comes back.
Every weekday at 8:30 · Auto-detected
Approved habits run in the background, in the same apps you use. Every step checks its own result. Steps that send, delete, or pay hold for your approval each time, with the exact content shown before anything goes out.
Waiting on you before it sends
Invoice 48812 bills 1,324.00 against a confirmed 1,240.00.
Most tools will not tell you when they decide something about you. These are the real numbers Plainwork uses.
Plainwork tracks how often you accept what it surfaces and moves its own bar to match. Reject a few and it gets stricter. Accept almost everything and it loosens up to show you more. The adjustment happens on your device, from your answers only.
This one is invoice reconciliation at a freight brokerage, because that is the kind of work nobody ever gets around to scripting. Yours will look different, but the path is the same.
Monday, 8:41
You do it by hand
A carrier invoice lands in Outlook. You pull the load reference, find it in the TMS, check the billed amount against the rate you confirmed, and log the gap in a sheet. Six minutes, give or take.
Tue, Thu, Fri
You do it three more times
Same apps, same order, different invoice. Nothing on your screen says Plainwork is paying attention, because it doesn't get in your way.
Friday, a detection pass
The pattern clears the bar
Four runs inside the seven day window, four meaningful steps. That is over the threshold, so it becomes a candidate and gets a name you can read.
Whenever you next open it
You get exactly one proposal
You read the proposed steps, and you approve. Total time spent configuring: under a minute. Plainwork's got it from here.
Every weekday, 8:30
Three steps run without you
It opens the invoice, looks up the load, and logs the variance. Then it stops, shows you the email it wants to send, and waits. That last step is yours forever unless you say otherwise.
What it ended up building
4 steps · 1 waits for you
*Every step is tagged with where it came from.
An app moves a button and a brittle script quietly does the wrong thing. What happens next?
Acting is not the same as succeeding. After every step, Plainwork re-reads the app to confirm the thing it was supposed to do actually happened.
Most failures are just an app that was not ready. Plainwork re-checks after half a second, then one second, then two, before it treats anything as broken.
If the check still fails, that one step gets retried with another execution layer, or finally goes to a model with only its own context. The corrected version is saved and tagged as self-healed.
No blind retry loop, no half-finished work left behind. The run stops, the habit shows the failure, and you decide what happens next.
Plainwork works through the same interfaces that screen readers and other automation tools use, so it does not need an API, a connector, or a vendor's permission. If the app runs on your device, it is in scope. That includes the ancient internal tool nothing else will touch.
Detection never leaves your device. Neither does the log it reads. The single exception is a step that needs reasoning rather than repetition, or a step that failed and is being rewritten. That one step goes out with its own immediate context and nothing else.
capture · detection · storage · every other step
Detection is the patient half of Plainwork. The fast half is you showing it a task directly, and that works the hour you install it.
Hit record, do the task the way you always do it, and stop. Plainwork turns that single pass into steps you can read, rename, and edit before anything runs. No waiting for a pattern to build up, and no threshold to clear.
This is the right move for the task you already know is eating your week. Let detection handle the ones you have stopped noticing.
Teach your first habitThe habit you taught is already running. Underneath it, detection is still collecting the week of signal it needs before it can propose anything worth reading. You are not waiting on it. It is catching up to you.
day 0
Teach it one yourself
do a task once while it records. you have a working habit the same afternoon.
start here, on the day you install it
day 1
It starts watching
in the background, while you get on with the rest of your work.
day 7
Proposals start arriving
the repeats you never thought to automate, now with enough signal to be sure.
day 30
A set that runs itself
the ones you taught, plus the ones it caught that you would have missed.
Before you install anything that watches your screen, these are the questions we'd want answered too.
More on securityPlainwork is early and we would rather say so than borrow credibility we have not earned. Here is the honest state of it.
Install it, work the way you already work, and give it a week.
macOS, Windows coming soon · Free during beta