I lost my sense of direction leaving the military, so I built a product to get it back

I'm building a personal operating system, and it started because I lost mine.

12 years in the Royal Air Force, first as a firefighter then flying as a commissioned officer. I'm currently being medically discharged. In the military you always know what's next. Civilian life just hands you time and expects you to know what to do with it. I didn't, for a while, and it hit me harder than I expected.

Microcosm is what came out of that.

It's three connected products:

→ MicroFocus — deep work sprints. One goal, AI breaks it into steps, timer runs, a capture layer (Orbit) catches stray thoughts without breaking focus.

→ MicroFlow — daily task management. Seven categories, AI categorisation, streaks, work and personal tasks weighted equally.

→ MicroGrowth — this is the one I actually care most about. Longitudinal tracking across five domains (Thinking & Clarity, Action & Momentum, Emotional Stability, Relationships & Communication, Direction & Purpose), fed by everything happening in the other two products. Observational, not scored — "evidence suggests" not "confidence: 74%." I didn't want to be reduced to a number again.

Where it's at:

- Built entirely solo, Node/Express + Supabase + Railway + Claude API

- Started as a single 9,500-line HTML prototype, validated the AI output at 8.9/10 across 12 project types before I touched any backend

- 178 commits over 10 weeks turned that into the real thing

- Live waitlist at themicrocosm.app

- Genuinely broke my own auth for 3 weeks at one point without noticing — that's a story for another post

Why I'm building it this way: most productivity tools optimise your calendar or organise your tasks. None of them ask what the work is actually doing to you. That's the gap I'm trying to fill — the unit of analysis is the person, not the task list.

Happy to answer anything — stack decisions, the AI prompt engineering, or just what it's like building this solo while going through a pretty major life transition at the same time.