How it works

Nine PM starts a five-minute clock.

Scrub through one real night, then read the rules that run it.

The timelineThe rulesOverrides & pausesStrict modeWhat counts as activityFAQ

The centerpiece

One night, start to finish.

Scrub through an actual curfew window: a 9 PM cutoff, a watched app that didn’t get the memo, and the five minutes that decide whether tonight’s a clean one.

Escalation rules

The rules, in full.

Everything the app checks, the defaults it ships with, and what you’re allowed to change about each one.

RuleDefaultWhat you can change
Curfew window9:00 PM → 6:00 AMSet per weekday. Any window that starts between 8 and 10 PM, ends by 6 AM and runs at least 7 hours.
Grace period5 minutes1, 2, 3 or 5 minutes, your call. Strict mode sets it to 0 — see below.
Watched appsEditors, AI coding tools, terminalsTurn any category off. The watched set is the curated catalog — no custom apps.
When grace runs outViolation → streak resets → posted to the Blotter with a roastNot configurable. That part's the point.
Quitting the app4 dark nights resets the streakA closed app can't verify a clean night. Four nights running without it and the streak assumes the worst.

Overrides & pauses

Two ways out that don’t cost you the streak.

An override stops tonight’s countdown mid-grace, for the night prod is actually on fire. A pause opts a night out ahead of time — you already know it’ll run late, so there’s nothing to catch.

Overrides2 left this monthCancels a grace countdown for tonight, no fall, streak untouched. For genuine emergencies — not a snooze button.
Pause tonight4 left this monthOpts one night out of monitoring entirely. Neither a clean night nor a fall — shows up as unverified, streak holds.

Both reset on the 1st. Neither one is a loophole: use all six in a month and the Wall will notice, even if the streak technically doesn’t break.

Opt-in

Strict mode, for people who don’t trust themselves with five minutes.

Zero grace

Grace period: zero. The instant a watched app hits the foreground after cutoff, that’s a fall — no countdown, no five minutes, no “just closing this tab.”

0 min grace
Off

Under the hood

What counts as activity.

CaughtShipping watches foreground time, nothing else: which watched app is the active window, added up into hourly buckets of active seconds. Step away for about three minutes — idle, locked screen, sleeping machine — and it stops counting. None of it ever blocks anything; it only ever reports what it saw.

Every app gets sorted into one category, the same ones behind every chart on this site:

Editors & IDEsAI codingTerminalsGit clientsDatabasesContainersDesignOther

The privacy promise

Only hourly, per-app totals ever leave your machine — never window titles, file names, URLs, keystrokes, or screenshots. No live feed of what you’re doing, ever.

Read the full privacy policy

Questions

Answered plainly, before you ask twice.

No. It has never force-quit anything and it isn't going to start with you. It watches, it counts, and if you blow the grace period, it tells on you. The rest — whether you keep coding — is between you and your editor.
Two overrides a month. Trigger one during grace and the countdown stops for the night, streak fully intact. This is for "prod is down," not "one more feature would be nice."
No. It only ever sees which watched app is in the foreground and for how long, rolled up into hourly numbers. No window titles, no file names, no URLs, no keystrokes, no screenshots. See "What counts as activity" above, or the full privacy policy.
Your streak lives on your account, not on the app's local files, so reinstalling by itself changes nothing. Going four nights in a row without the app actually running is what resets it — a closed app can't verify anything, clean or otherwise.
You can pick a handle that isn't your name. But the Wall and the Blotter are public by design — that's the whole mechanism. A private accountability tool isn't accountability, it's a diary.
Curfew follows your device's local clock, so it re-centers itself wherever you land. Rested users can also pin a fixed schedule if their hours shouldn't move with them.
Free gets you the Wall, the Blotter, and the getting-caught part. Rested adds all-day hourly tracking, the reports dashboard, a weekly Rest Report Card, a README badge, and one automatic pardon a month for the night you truly did not see coming.
Yes. That’s the point. "Missed curfew" isn’t a story. "Cursor, 11:41 PM" is.
Then nothing happens — on purpose. Grace only starts once a watched app is actually detected in the foreground. This isn’t surveillance that assumes guilt; it’s a record of what it actually saw. See nothing, report nothing.
No — foreground time, not keystrokes. If a watched app is the active window, the clock runs whether you’re typing or just staring at a stack trace. It’s only idle time (screen locked, machine asleep, you’ve clearly wandered off for ~3 minutes) that doesn’t count.

You’ve seen the whole night. Set your own.

Free, and it never blocks anything.

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