How I’m keeping my open-source local AI app alive (and hardcoding my supporters into the UI)

Let’s be honest about side projects: they usually end up in a GitHub graveyard. A few months ago, I was completely burning out. Between my dyslexia and the intense cognitive load of writing C# and untangling SQL all day, my working memory by 5:00 PM was entirely shot. Trying to remember what I actually did just to write my daily stand-up updates felt like an impossible wall of executive dysfunction. So, I built SheepCat a 100% offline, local-first work tracker that uses Ollama to gently turn my messy, typo-filled brain dumps into clean corporate updates without leaking my company's proprietary code to the cloud. I built it just to survive my own brain. But when I open-sourced it, the response from the community was incredible. Seeing other devs use it to reclaim their flow state and beat "time blindness" has been the highlight of my year. The Reality of Open Source Maintenance Keeping a desktop app alive, fixing bugs, and refactoring the architecture takes a lot of late nights. Up unti