Hi HN,

We're Jake, Scott, and Akshay – the founders of walrus.ai[1]. Throughout the process of building our previous startup, we learned first-hand how important automated test coverage is to any product. At the same time, it was such a pain to implement. As we spoke to our customers, we learned that they hated writing these tests too.

So we decided to build a product that drastically simplifies how we write end-to-end tests – and that's walrus.ai.

Features:

- Easy — write tests in plain english - Fast — get results in 5 minutes - Developer-first — integrates directly with your CI/CD through an API call - Reliable — human-verified results

You can try us for free, and we'd appreciate any feedback! scott@walrus.ai

[1] https://walrus.ai

FYI I could not tell from the website what it really does or how it works

Yup, that's the unfortunate reality you can find yourself in if these things aren't taken into consideration early on.

However, that doesn't mean improvements can never be made. Sounds like it definitely still would've been worth your team learning React!

I actually address that in the post. In short, automated testing is of course useful and should be utilized whenever possible. However, a manual bug bash still allows you to:

1. catch any unknown edge cases that may not be covered by your test suite 2. allow all stakeholders in the project to see the (near) final product

The near-finished product comment makes sense. So many times the engineers cut corners and don’t actually implement the real designs.

Care to elaborate? Interesting to rule out all modern technology as “shitty”

Not all of modern technology is so bad, but a lot of it (perhaps, most of it) is bad.

Monolist | San Francisco | Full-Time | Full Stack Engineer | https://monolist.co

Monolist intelligently aggregates your tasks from across all of the platforms and tools your company uses into one actionable list. Monolist wants to enable you to focus on what truly matters, and drastically simplify how you track what you need to do.

We are backed by great investors, and are making our first hire. This is a great opportunity to shape a company in a massive market from the ground up. There are 3 of us, and we are based in San Francisco.

Read more at [1] below, or feel free to reach out to me at jake@monolist.co.

[1] https://monolist.co/jobs/full-stack-engineer/

Hi HN! We posted a couple of weeks ago about Inbox being shut down and our hopes to build Monolist into a more powerful replacement. At the time we were still building our Gmail integration, and so our original title was changed. However, over 800 of you signed up to help us build that vision. We're happy to now start delivering on our promise!

This is a wonderful implementation - Congrats.

Other features that could be great (long term):

- Inter-entity relationships. If there is an email that comes through related to an asana/todist item, can they be linked other than by tags? Nesting and bundling of items would be great.

- 'Projects' alongside tags, so that users can collect items into finite-time groups

- Export feature (to JSON or CSV)

- Zapier integration

- Reports, or integration with a reporting / sql / dashboard application such as PowerBI

- Integration with Google maps / embedding maps / location attributes on entities

The above may be way beyond scope and not in line with your vision - However, I believe the next 10 years will see a consolidation in B2C tools not unlike B2B ERPs did to consolidate old micro services back in the day - Not to just an 'inbox' but more of a larger scope 'entity relationship manager'. Therefore users may want other entities represented and inter-related such as Areas (of focus), Tasks, Events, Locations, Goals, Items etc. Monolist could be seen as a step in this direction.

We actually do have full Jira Cloud (and Confluence) support! Those just went live in the last week.

Oops, that pricing page was actually left up erroneously (thus why it's not linked anywhere). That was a previous pricing model that is no longer active. Monolist is currently entirely free while we're in this open beta and development phase.

We actually abandoned that model because we agree with you. Limiting the number of items per month would be going against the use case of the product.

How will you be monetizing it?

We think a lot of the same problems that Monolist is solving for the individual also exist for cross-functional teams. The plan is to eventually offer paid enterprise and team-based features.

Thanks for that. I'll be giving it a try

We require full Google Drive access for a few reasons:

- Creating action items when you're tagged on any file - Creating action items when any comments are left on your files - Allowing you to search your entire Drive from Monolist

We never store the contents of your actual files. Those are just the permissions necessary to keep you up to date on any Drive action items.

Any way you can make that permission optional? I suspect there are a lot of people who may not know or care about Drive integration and as a result may not want to grant full Drive access.

That's definitely possible, and an option we've considered but haven't yet been able to implement. We'll be sure to add it to our list. Thanks for the feedback!

I would suggest making this an additional permission you ask for when the user has actually seen the product and wants to use this feature.

I don't think we'll ever be "finished". All the features that are listed in the blog post other than email (coming later this week), are already implemented, and you can check them out!

I know that email is the biggest one considering we're trying to replace Inbox, but I think creating a richer experience around transactional emails you receive from all your apps is already leaps and bounds better than Gmail for that use case.