Brutl Productivity.

Brutl is a focus-first Pomodoro tool with an AI coach in the drawer — designed and built end-to-end across UI, copy, auth, and AI integration. The product targets a simple frustration: most Pomodoro apps stack timers underneath a layer of streaks, social proof, and gamification that pulls attention back out of the work it is supposed to protect. Brutl strips that down. The interface is one clean timer, one drawer for the coach, and nothing else competing for the eye while a session is running.

The AI coach runs on Groq inference with a multi-key rotation strategy to extend the free-tier rate-limit headroom. When a session stalls or the user goes idle, the coach reads the running session context and replies with a short, situational nudge instead of a generic notification. Groq was chosen over a heavier API for sub-second response latency, which matters when the coach is supposed to feel like a quiet companion rather than a slow batch job. Multi-key rotation lets the early-stage product scale past per-key quotas without prematurely committing to a paid plan during the validation phase.

Frontend is vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript deployed to Hostinger via a GitHub Actions FTP pipeline. Backend is Node.js + Express on DigitalOcean, deployed over SSH with PM2 process management and health-checked restarts on every push. The split-host architecture keeps the static front cheap and snappy while giving the Node API the persistent process model it actually needs. Picking vanilla JavaScript over a framework kept the bundle small, the deploy path simple, and the time-to-first-paint fast on mobile networks — useful constraints for an early product where every second of perceived sluggishness is a churn risk.

The whole project was a solo end-to-end build — design, copy, auth flow, AI prompt engineering, and the CI/CD plumbing. The lesson it bakes in: every additional dependency is a future maintenance cost, and the right time to pick boring, well-understood tech is when you are the one who has to keep it running at 2am.

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