Dev spends 12.5 months of nights building a local, Claude Code-style meeting scribe

Jazzlike-Swing-6198 · reddit · 2026-11-09

A software engineer spent 12.5 months of nights and weekends building Samurai Scribe, a fully local meeting assistant (Mac + Windows) that records Zoom/Teams/Meet or in-person calls, transcribes them, separates speakers, and writes notes — ask "what did I promise Marta this week?" and it answers with a link to the exact moment. No bots, no accounts; everything lives as plain Markdown you can open in Obsidian, with Claude Code-style diff-based editing (Ask/Review/Accept/Auto modes) and a built-in MCP server.

Build retrospective highlights:

1,500 commits (Claude co-authored 1,086), 72 releases; code was only half the work — testing, chasing Windows GPU-driver crashes, and user support took the rest
Pitfalls: Python backend was too slow (ported to Rust over Christmas); moved from JSON to SQLite before realizing "Markdown files are the database"
A Claude Code plugin manages 150+ tickets: files GitHub issues, works them in separate worktrees, drafts replies to bug reporters at each release
Lessons: early replies claimed fixes that only existed on a dev branch; long never-ending chat sessions burned 99% of his weekly Claude limit — start fresh sessions

Free version never expires; Pro is $19 once during beta ($39 after Nov 16).

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Dev spends 12.5 months of nights building a local, Claude Code-style meeting scribe

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