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Un outil d’écriture assisté par IA qui se fait discret. Les suggestions apparaissent en marge, jamais au milieu de votre phrase.

— Role: Fullstack
— Year: 2023
— Client: Personnel
— Stack: Next.js · OpenAI · Postgres

— 01 · The brief

A self-hosted project management tool for distributed teams who don’t live in their inbox.

Most of the team had tried Asana, Notion, Linear — and all of them felt either too heavy or too prescribed. We wanted something that respected the way our studio already worked: in shared rituals, in scattered async messages, in occasional bursts of intense collaboration.

Mosaic started as a weekend experiment with HTMX on top of Django. The idea was simple: render full pages on the server, swap fragments in place, and never write a line of JavaScript framework code. Three months later it was running in our studio and four others. Nine months in, fourteen design studios are using it daily.

The hardest constraint wasn’t technical — it was philosophical. Most PM tools try to be everything to everyone. Mosaic chose, deliberately, to be small. Three views, two object types, one strong opinion about how projects should breathe.

01 Chapter · Discovery

Three weeks of watching how teams actually work.

Before writing a line of code, I shadowed five distributed studios for three weeks each. I watched stand-ups, retros, async hand-offs. I read their Notion docs and their Slack channels.

The pattern was always the same: people bypassed the formal PM tool the moment things got real. Decisions happened in DMs. Status updates lived in private docs. The PM tool was a graveyard of stale tickets.

Insight 01Most PM software is built for managers, not the people doing the work.
Insight 02Distributed teams need rituals, not just dashboards.
Insight 03Speed is a feature. 200ms latency kills a tool.

Fig. 01 · Research

Field notes · 3 weeks 05 studios

02 Chapter · Design

One board. Three views. Two object types.

The design constraints I settled on were almost embarrassingly small. A project has a board. A board has cards. Cards have a status. That's it.

The interesting design work was in what to leave out: no nested subtasks, no custom fields, no automation rules. Everything else lives in the card body — written in Markdown, edited inline, history kept in plain Git-style diffs.

Move 01Three views (Board, Index, Now) — switch with a single keystroke.
Move 02Cards are documents with a status, not tickets with metadata.
Move 03Daily digest at 9am. No notifications. No badges.

Fig. 02 · Board view

Todo · 4 Doing · 3 Review · 2 Done · 8

Board · live data Project / Spring '26

03 Chapter · Build

Django on the server, HTMX on the wire, joy in the seams.

The architecture is unfashionably boring on purpose. Django renders full HTML. HTMX swaps fragments. Postgres does the heavy lifting. Redis caches the hot paths. There's no API. There's no client state.

The wire is so quiet that the whole app feels offline. Cards drag-reorder in 30ms. Filter changes feel instant. The longest interaction in the app — opening a card — takes 64ms over 4G.

Stack 01Django 5 + HTMX 2 + Tailwind 4 + Alpine 3.
Stack 02Postgres 16 with pg_search for full-text, Redis 7 for cache.
Stack 03Deployed on Fly.io, 3 regions, ~$28/month per studio.

Fig. 03 · Architecture

BrowserHTMX · Alpine

NginxEdge cache

DjangoTemplates · Forms

PostgresSource of truth

RedisSessions · Cache

S3Files · Avatars

Architecture diagram v 1.4.2

— Kind words

“

Mosaic is the first PM tool I've used that doesn't try to manage me. The team uses it daily — that's the highest compliment I can give a piece of software.

Maya Okafor CTO · Cobalt Studio · early adopter

Quill.

Three weeks of watching how teams actually work.

One board. Three views. Two object types.

Django on the server, HTMX on the wire, joy in the seams.

The artefacts.

Atlas.