Pill Cat

A cat that walks to the window you're actually looking at.

Not a notification you swipe away in a corner. When a dose is due, the cat walks over to whatever you're working in — your editor, your inbox, your spreadsheet — and waits. You log the dose by petting it.

$ curl -fsSL https://pillcat.gtll.app/install.sh | bash

macOS, Linux and Windows (WSL). Needs Node 18+. Installs the pillcat command, then run pillcat.

Why this exists

~50% of people with chronic conditions don't take medication as prescribed WHO, Adherence to Long-Term Therapies

125,000 deaths a year in the US attributed to non-adherence Annals of Internal Medicine, 2012

$100–300B in avoidable US health spending each year Annals of Internal Medicine, 2012

Forgetting is the most cited reason — a memory failure, not a motivation failure Widely replicated across adherence surveys

Prospective memory — remembering to do a thing at a future moment — is the part that fails. It doesn't fail because people don't care. It fails because nothing in the room changed. So Pill Cat changes the room: something alive walks into your field of view, in the window you're already staring at, and stays there until you deal with it.

How it works

Add a medication and a time. That's the whole setup. No account, no sign-up.
The cat shows up when a dose is due — at the bottom edge of the window that currently has focus, not in a corner of the screen. It's click-through, so it never eats a click meant for your work.
Pet it to log the dose. Stroke it for about a second. The label above it names the exact medication and scheduled time first, so you always know what you just recorded.
Its coat is your streak. Two good weeks and it's glossy, plush, bright-eyed and springy. Weeks of missed doses and it's dull, thin and slow. You never have to open anything to know how you're doing.

The part families pay for

Caregiver mode

Your mom's cat lives on your screen too, beside your own. You don't get a report or an alert — you glance over and see her cat is restless. That's the whole interface. No reminder app does this, because a text alert about someone else's medication reads as surveillance, and a restless animal reads as concern.

on timeSettled loafing, slow blink, tail curled
0–12 minWaiting sits up, ears forward, looking at you
12–45 minRestless pacing back and forth, tail low
45 min +At the door sat at the screen's edge facing away, tail lashing, glancing back

Escalation is deliberately slow. A cat that panics at minute one is just a notification with fur, and notifications get dismissed. You can send a wordless nudge back — her cat perks up and looks toward the door. It carries no text, so it can never become "did you take your pills??".

What it does with your data

Local by default

One JSON file on your own machine. No account, no network, nothing leaves until you switch sync on yourself.

Consent is a handshake

A caregiver can't add you by email or phone. You generate a code on your machine; it expires in 15 minutes and works once. Either side can unlink.

Never reads your screen

It needs to know which window has focus to walk there. Window titles are never stored, logged or sent — only the app name, and only in memory.

Shared only if you share

Sync sends medication names and dose timestamps. Never your log file, your app names, or anything about your machine.

Honest limits

Pill Cat is not a medical device and gives no medical advice. It records what you tell it and nothing more — it cannot know whether you actually swallowed a pill, and a streak is not clinical evidence. Don't change a dose or a schedule because of anything on this screen; that conversation belongs with whoever prescribed it. If you're managing something where a missed dose is dangerous, use it alongside a pharmacy or clinical system, not instead of one.