A military software developer created the Kaizen life manager: how a vibecoding experiment turned a long-standing idea into an app on the App Store

How military experience and productivity practices shaped the concept of the life manager

The idea of ​​creating the application was born from Yaroslav Sherstyuk's real life and professional experience. As a former military man with experience in command positions, he is used to the fact that systematicity, control, speed of decision-making, planning and coordination of tasks are not just abstract words from books about productivity. For him, these are critically important elements that directly affect the result. That is why it was fundamentally important for Yaroslav to create not just “another AI application” or another good task manager, but a powerful system capable of keeping life, work and strategic goals in one place.

In an effort to find the perfect solution, Yaroslav began to delve deeply into the topic of productivity. He studied in detail various methodologies and bestsellers, including GTD (Getting Things Done), “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” the Eisenhower Method, the Pomodoro Technique, and various approaches to life and business planning.

After analyzing the task managers available on the market, Yaroslav realized that almost all of them are limited to banal lists of tasks, where the task is perceived as an ordinary reminder. He wanted something completely different - to create an ecosystem that would unite areas of life, global goals, daily tasks, habits, notes, environment and context. In his vision, each person has many roles: father, husband, son, employee, developer or manager. Each role has its own big goals, for example, to earn a million dollars, but to achieve them, specific daily actions, routine tasks and useful habits are required.

Yaroslav sought to combine all these disparate elements into a single, clear, and logical system, which ultimately resulted in the concept of Kaizen.

Personal operating system for humans

Kaizen is an app that brings together tasks, goals, habits, notes, contacts, and life areas into a single workspace. It has a minimalist interface for maximum focus on what's important.

Application functionality:

• Task Manager: Allows you to create and organize tasks with priorities, deadlines, reminders, tags, and links to goals, areas of life, or people. It also has smart lists for automatic grouping and filtering of tasks.
• Calendar and planning: Switch between lists and interactive calendar modes (day, week, month). Group and filter tasks by any important parameters.
• Habit tracking: you can form new habits and track series of their implementation, there are also settings for recurring actions and tracking daily progress.
• Goal setting and achievement: allows you to break down large goals into smaller tasks and visualize progress.
• Notes and idea capture: You can create organized notes, add tags, and associate them with tasks or areas of your life for instant context.
• Quickly enter tasks: On macOS, you can instantly capture new tasks with a single hotkey so you never lose an idea.
• Widgets: Allows you to view the most important information right on your Home screen or in Notification Center using widgets.
• Integration with Apple Watch .
• Flexible organization: You can use tags, people, and areas of life to structure your productivity system the way you want.
• Statistics and analytics: allows you to analyze progress and identify the most effective areas, habits, and performance patterns.
• Cross-device sync: Access data on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch.
• Data privacy: no third-party servers — everything stays on the user's devices.

Kaizen is available for download for macOS and iPhone .

Experiment: minimum manual code, maximum vibecoding

It was artificial intelligence that allowed Yaroslav to extremely quickly turn his long-standing idea into a real product. According to him, if it weren't for AI technology, he simply wouldn't have had the free time to create this project.

The results of the experiment were impressive — the first MVP was released on the App Store just 5 days after launch.

Kaizen was built on SwiftUI for three platforms: iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Being a passionate supporter of the Apple ecosystem, Yaroslav wanted to develop a single native product. He fundamentally rejected custom UI, believing that Apple had already done a great job with its standard components and user experience (UX).

His workflow looked like this: first, using mind mapping, Yaroslav sketched out the structure of the future application — screens, connections, logic, and interaction between all elements. Since the system itself had long been thought out in detail in his head, he clearly knew what each screen should contain, how the navigation would work, and what action would occur after clicking.

The developer's approach was as radical as possible: he wrote almost nothing by hand. His role transformed into the functions of a system architect, product owner, prompt engineer, and the person who finally tests and checks the result. At the same time, Yaroslav emphasizes that control over the process still remains mandatory.

Evaluating the work of artificial intelligence, he notes that the technologies have brilliantly coped with business logic, structure, service layer, architecture, refactoring and generation of typical code. At the same time, the weak point of AI has been the interface. In the so-called vibe coding, the patterning is very clearly traced, due to which modern applications begin to become too similar to each other.

"For working with SwiftUI, I like Codex the most. However, skepticism still remains: sometimes, due to endless bug fixes by artificial intelligence, you could do more with your hands in the same 5 hours. Therefore, today, AI for me is not magic or a replacement for a programmer, but a very mature instrumental toy. The biggest turning point came with the appearance of agents in the IDE, when AI began to really work with you, and not just respond in a chat. Now you control the process: you formulate a task, AI implements it, and you iteratively check and improve the result. At some point, you notice that you type much less code than before. Instead, you think much more about structure, architecture, UX, and relationships. And this is probably the main change in the programming profession in recent years," shares Yaroslav.

What's next?

Although the task manager market is critically oversaturated today — from basic Apple Reminders to powerful Todoist, TickTick, Notion, and Things — Kaizen has its advantages.

Most existing tools focus solely on the mechanical execution of tasks. Instead, Kaizen looks deeper and works with a person's life as a holistic system, integrating routine, goals, and analytics into one living organism.

That is why Yaroslav plans to develop the product further, because he offers the market a fundamentally new philosophy of self-organization, which is worth testing in person just once.

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