What is aysdog? (a wise dog for your systems)

aysdog is not a company. It's not a startup. It's not a platform. It's a dog. A very opinionated, slightly unhinged, deeply anti-bloat dog that lives in your terminal and refuses to fetch unnecessary dependencies.

Where did this come from

It started the way most honest software projects start — with genuine frustration. Not "let's disrupt the market" frustration. The quieter, more personal kind. The kind where you spend 40 minutes trying to screenshot something, give up, open Slack to send it, and realise you've now installed three apps and none of them actually did the thing.

The tools existed. They were just... wrong. Bloated. Needy. Electron-wrapped, account-gated, telemetry-drenched shells of what a tool should be. Every single one wanted to be a platform. None of them wanted to be a tool.

So we built our own. Then another. Then another. At some point we looked around and realised we had a collection of little sharp things that just worked. No drama. No server. No phone-home. We called it aysdog, named after the kind of dog that watches everything going on around the house, knows exactly what's wrong, and fixes it silently while you sleep.

The philosophy (or: why we're like this)

There's a certain kind of software that respects you. It does one thing. It does it well. It doesn't ask for your email. It doesn't have a freemium tier. It doesn't send you a "we miss you" notification six days after you used it once.

That's what we're building. Every aysdog tool follows three rules that we treat less like guidelines and more like a religion:

• Zero telemetry. We do not want your data. We do not want anonymous usage stats. We do not want "aggregate insights". We want nothing. You run the tool, you get the output, we never know it happened. That's the deal.
• Self-hostable forever. Your laptop. A $5 VPS. A Raspberry Pi in a drawer. An air-gapped server in a literal bunker. All valid. If you can run a binary, you can run aysdog.
• Single binary when possible. No npm. No pip install with 47 sub-dependencies. No "you'll also need to install libsomething-dev". You get a file. You run the file. Done.

Break any of these rules and the tool doesn't ship. Simple as that.

Why a dog

Dogs are loyal. Dogs are useful. Dogs don't ask why you need something — they just go get it. A good dog sits at the edge of the system, watches everything, and only barks when something actually needs barking at.

That's the energy. aysdog tools sit at the edge of your workflow. They don't demand attention. They don't have a dashboard you need to check. They do their job and get out of the way. Like a well-trained dog who respects your boundaries but will absolutely destroy a dependency tree if you ask it to.

Also the logo is a dog. We thought that was funny. It still is.

What we've built so far

We're not trying to ship fifty tools. We're trying to ship a handful of tools that are genuinely the best at what they do — for a certain kind of developer who cares about the same things we do.

• ss editor — screenshot annotation tool. One HTML file. ~42 KB. Opens from file://. No install. Try it.
• pdfduck — drop PDFs, get clean CSV back. Bulk extraction without the tears. Try it.
• My Secret — encrypted vaults with a twist. Share secrets that reveal themselves under conditions you control. Try it.
• system draw — system design tool that doesn't look like it was designed in 2009. Coming soon.

More things are in the oven. We'll ship them when they're ready. Not because a roadmap says so.

Who is building this

Mostly me (anirban) and whoever I can convince to contribute on GitHub. We're not a team of forty. We're not VC-backed. We don't have a growth department or a head of developer relations. We have a GitHub org, some opinions, and a genuine dislike of unnecessary software complexity.

The contributors are people who ran into the same wall and decided to help knock it down. That's the whole hiring process. You find a problem, you open a PR, you don't add telemetry.

How to be part of it

Use the tools. Tell someone about them. Open an issue if something is broken. Open a PR if you know how to fix it. Argue with us on X if you think we're wrong about something — we're not, but we enjoy the conversation.

Everything is MIT licensed. Fork it, rename it, ship your own version. We won't be upset. We'll probably star the repo.

The only thing we ask: don't add telemetry. That's it. That's the one rule you can't break.