Streams, Karma, and what didn't make Version 1

Version 1 of Chakra closes with two things that weren’t in the original scope: Streams, which turned out to be necessary, and Karma, which turned out to be worth adding.

Streams

A Space is for one project or area of work. But over time, you accumulate Spaces. Some of them belong together — all your coursework Spaces, all your side project Spaces, all your health-related Spaces. There was no concept in the app for this grouping.

Streams is that concept. A Stream sits above Spaces. It’s a named container that Spaces can belong to, with its own view, its own share model, and its own activity summary.

The implementation was substantial: StreamCard, StreamCreateModal, StreamDetail, and StreamShareModal — 2399 lines added in one commit. StreamDetail is the most complex at 779 lines. It renders all the Spaces inside the Stream, their combined task counts, shared member lists, and a summary of recent activity across all of them.

The share model for Streams mirrors the Space share model — the same Edge Function, the same RLS patterns. A person added to a Stream gets read access to all the Spaces inside it, but edit access on individual Spaces still requires a separate share on that Space. The Stream is a view, not a permission boundary.

Karma

Karma is the gamification layer. Every task you complete earns points — more for high-priority tasks, more for completing ahead of a deadline, less for completing something overdue. Your Karma score is visible on your profile and on the home screen.

It’s not a serious productivity metric. It’s just satisfying. There is real behavioural psychology behind reward loops in task management, and Karma is the acknowledgment of that. The score is meaningless in an objective sense and meaningfully motivating in practice.

The feature cutoff

Not everything that was started made it into Version 1. The cutoff decision on April 9 was deliberate — there’s a list of things that are in and a list of things that aren’t yet.

What made it: Kanban, calendar view, list view, Today view with Drift and Momentum, recurring tasks, multiuser Spaces, Streams, Karma, notifications, reports, mobile layout.

What didn’t make it: real-time cursor presence in shared Spaces, a full activity feed, custom task templates, mobile push notifications.

The right version of Version 1 is not the one with the most features. It’s the one where every included feature works well enough that you’d use it as your actual task manager. That bar is harder to clear than it sounds.

The onboarding tour shipped April 10 — the day after the cutoff — as a final pre-Version-1 step. New users get a guided walkthrough of the key concepts. The tour took less time to build than deciding what was in it.

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Version 1 is done. Using it now.