A single dashboard for the daily scramble

Staff software engineer Brittany Ellich got tired of juggling a dozen apps just to figure out what she needed to do next. Her answer was a personal "command center": a desktop app that pulls her calendar, tasks and other Microsoft 365 data into one calm, central view. The project, which she built almost entirely with GitHub Copilot in agent mode, is open source and ready to clone.

Ellich works on metered billing at GitHub — tracking things like Actions minutes and storage usage — but her side project grew out of a more personal pain point: digital fragmentation. Instead of accepting the context switching across several tools, she set out to unify them.

Planning first, implementation second

Ellich describes her approach as a "plan-then-implement" workflow. During the planning phase, she has Copilot act as an interviewer, asking her questions about how the system should behave until the two of them land on a plan she's happy with. Only then does she let Copilot move into implementation.

That division of labor paid off in the timeline. Her v1 went from an idea to a working tool in a single day, alongside her regular job.

How she works with AI agents

For synchronous development, Ellich works in agent mode in VS Code, typically running up to two non-competing agent workflows at a time. When she needs to parallelize, she sends well-scoped tasks — such as bug fixes or tech debt — to the Copilot Cloud Agent for asynchronous work while she focuses on the pieces that need more oversight.

One honest caveat from her experience: agents are far more comfortable adding code than deleting it. Making the repository publicly accessible required her to go in and simplify the repo by hand, which meant getting comfortable reading Electron code despite it being her first Electron app. That said, she says agents built almost all of it.

The stack behind the command center

Ellich's exact setup is available in her command-center-lite repository, but the core pieces are worth knowing on their own:

  • Electron: cross-platform desktop application framework
  • React: JavaScript UI library for components and state management
  • Vite: build tool with hot module replacement
  • Tailwind: CSS utility framework
  • WorkIQ MCP: an MCP server and CLI for pulling in Microsoft 365 data

Ellich's preference for the stack is revealing: she says she "can't say I learned a ton about Electron" during the process, because agent mode did the heavy lifting. For her, the specifics of the underlying framework matter less than the workflow around it.

Build your own

If you want to spin up a similar command center, you'll need a few things on your machine: Node.js (v18 or later), the GitHub Copilot CLI (for WorkIQ setup), a Microsoft 365 account for calendar sync, and an ElevenLabs account if you want the voice assistant pieces. The repository's README has the full setup instructions.

The broader lesson from Ellich's project is that the most useful tools often start as small fixes for everyday annoyances — and that Copilot in agent mode can take you from a rough idea to a working first version in a matter of hours, not weeks.