Rowkeeper

I knit, and the tools for keeping your place are bad.

Every knitter knows the small, specific misery of losing your place: mid-row, mid-repeat, or the moment you set the work down to answer the door. The options are a plastic clicker that only counts one number, or a phone app you poke at with yarn-covered fingers while your eyes dart off your knitting.

Rowkeeper is my attempt at a better one. I'm the user, so every decision is a decision I actually feel.

Underneath, it isn't a knitting problem.

It's the problem of surfacing the right next step, at the right moment, for someone whose hands and eyes are busy with something physical. Following a recipe while you cook is the same problem. So is most hands-on work.

I think of it as designing the interface for doing things with your hands. It's the same instinct behind the AI work I do: meet a person at the exact moment of the task, not before and not after.

Six calls, all of them from being the user.

• Tap anywhere.Your hands are full, so the whole screen is the button. No precise target to hit; a nudge with a knuckle advances the row.
• Glance, don't read.One row at a time, large, in a warm serif. You look up for half a second and look back down at the needles.
• A companion, not an app.Warm paper, generous space, no streaks or badges or productivity guilt. It should feel like a notebook, not a dashboard.
• Handle the real mess.Patterns aren't a flat list. They have repeats (rib for twelve rounds), open-ended sections (knit until it measures six inches), and changing stitch counts. Rowkeeper tracks all three.
• Never lose your place.It remembers exactly where you were, so putting it down costs you nothing. That single behavior is the whole point of the thing.
• Read aloud, optionally.For when even glancing is too much, it can speak each row, so you can keep your eyes on your hands.

The tracker is the easy half.

The hard half is the input. Real patterns are messy PDFs full of abbreviations, sizes, and idiosyncratic formatting, and no two are structured the same way. The unlock is an AI that reads any pattern and turns it into clean, followable steps.

That is the difference between a nice demo and a thing you would actually use with your own patterns. It's the part I'm building next, and it's where the design problem gets genuinely interesting: how much do you trust the parse, how do you correct it, and how do you show the person what the machine understood.

Designed and built, by hand, in code.

This is the point as much as the product. The fastest way from an idea I have while knitting to a thing I can use that same night is to be the person who does both the design and the build. Rowkeeper is a small proof of that.

Where it goes.

• 01AI pattern parsing: paste a PDF, get clean steps.
• 02A hands-free way to advance: a foot pedal, or a small e-ink display to sit by the couch.
• 03The cooking sibling, same engine, voice-first.
• 04[ Your honest note on what you'd change. ]