Hi HN, I’m Tobi. For a couple of hours over the past few days I’ve been hacking on something to fix a pain point in my dev workflow: writing status updates. Progress is invisible by default. GitHub, Linear, Jira all track tickets and code, but they don’t do a good job of capturing the narrative between “ticket started” and “ticket done.”

You start working on a feature, your PM asks “how’s it going?”, and even though you know exactly how it’s going - because you’ve been committing and making progress - you still struggle to answer. That usually means breaking your flow to piece together an update, or just saying “it’s going fine.” You could point them to the commits, but tbj they probably don’t want to wade through diffs.

To solve this I built Zyg [pronounced zeig]. It tries to turn commits into human-readable progress updates. It’s a lightweight CLI + dashboard that wraps `git commit`. Running `zyg` will generate a detailed commit message from your changes, produce a project update from that commit or a set of commits you choose, and notify any stakeholders who are subscribed. If you’d rather not share updates automatically, you can just copy the generated summary and drop it in Slack or email.

Zyg is free for September thanks to an API credit grant from Anthropic. After that I’ll figure out pricing, but you can also plug in your own key and keep using it for free. It’s still rough around the edges, but I’d appreciate you giving it a spin.