At eight in the morning, coffee in hand, I open my kanban board. Sitting in the Pending column is a new task:

2026-07-12 Blog Draft (scheduled)

Inside it: a complete blog draft. And in the comment thread, two messages left overnight:

01:01 — On it — topic scan done, picking task-management-overview. Drafting now.

01:03 — Done — draft is in the note. Task set to pending for review.

The author is not a person. It's an AI agent. While I was asleep, it picked a topic, checked the product docs, wrote the draft, moved the task to "pending review", and said hi in the comment thread.

You want to hand a web article to an AI — to summarize it, translate it, or ask questions about it. How do you do that today?

Select-all and copy? You paste a mess of navigation bars, ads, recommendation widgets, and broken formatting. Send the link? Many AI tools can't fetch pages, and when they can, the result is often incomplete.

The UnDercontrol Web Clipper Chrome extension gives you a cleaner answer: click Copy Markdown, and the page's article content is extracted into tidy Markdown on your clipboard — no login, no account, no configuration. Install it and it works on any page. Paste it into Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI, and what it gets is pure content with zero noise.

Most tools decide for you what a task "looks like": a few fixed dropdowns, a hard-coded set of fields, someone else's taxonomy. But in reality every person, every team, every workflow wants to track different dimensions — one needs "priority", another needs "client", "estimate", "department", and someone else just wants to slap on a tag and filter later.

UnDercontrol doesn't impose structure. It gives you three composable layers: free-form tags, typed custom fields, and arbitrary key-value metadata. All three are directly queryable, so you can slice the same set of tasks along your dimensions instead of bending to the tool's taxonomy.

This rests on a core UnDercontrol idea: a task is not just a to-do — it's a universal container for information. The same Markdown editor runs across tasks, notes, expenses, and accounts — every text surface. Tags and custom fields are how you layer your own structure on top of that container.

Unix has a famous design philosophy: everything is a file. Directories, devices, pipes, sockets — all read and written through one uniform interface. Simple, unified, composable.

UnDercontrol borrows the same idea, just with a different primitive: everything is a Task.

Most tools treat a "task" as a single line with a checkbox. UnDercontrol never did. Here, a Task is a universal information container — it can be a to-do, a document, a reminder, a blog draft, meeting minutes, a decision record, even a wiki page. One data source, organized your way, all in one place.

In one sentence: ud pull checks your cloud tasks, notes, and attachments out as local Markdown files, and ud push sends your local edits back. As natural as git clone and git push.

Many working copies, one server, edit from anywhere.

We've all gotten used to "X as Code" — infrastructure as code, configuration as code, docs as code. The reason is simple: plain text can be diffed, reviewed, version-controlled, and read or written directly by scripts and AI.

So why are your tasks, notes, and todos still locked inside some SaaS database, reachable only by clicking through its UI one item at a time?

UnDercontrol's answer is Everything as Code. Here, a task is a piece of Markdown with YAML frontmatter. That's it.

When choosing a productivity tool, you often face a familiar dilemma: web apps are powerful but useless offline, desktop apps feel great but lock your data locally, and CLI tools are developer-friendly but lack a visual interface. The root cause is the absence of a Single Source of Truth — each platform is an island, and your data is scattered across them. UnDercontrol's answer: four form factors, one data source. And that data source is entirely under your control — self-hosted on your own server or stored on your local disk, never passing through any third party. Privacy and security are defined by you.

What Is a Task?​

In UnDercontrol, a Task is the core unit of information. If you've used Jira, think of it as an Issue; if you've used Obsidian, think of it as a Note. A Task is essentially a piece of content bound to a status, with first-class attributes (title, tags, link relationships, etc.) and support for unlimited custom metadata fields (key-value pairs), so you can attach any information to it. Through the Notes mechanism, a Task can continuously evolve — recording progress, discussions, and decisions, accumulating into a complete knowledge context over time.

This post covers the rich-text capabilities shared across all text input surfaces in UnDercontrol. We say "tasks", but it's not just tasks — whether it's a task description, a note, an expense memo, or an account annotation, they all use the same Markdown editor. The code blocks, Mermaid diagrams, tables, and checklists you use in tasks work identically in notes and every other context.

You write a task description in the web UI. You click a button. Thirty seconds later, an AI agent on your laptop is reading the task, writing code, running tests, and posting progress notes back to the same task page — all while you watch from the browser.

That's Remote Workspace. It bridges the gap between a cloud-based task manager and your local development environment, turning UnDercontrol into a remote control for AI-powered coding agents.

You're at a coffee shop. Someone asks about that project plan you've been working on. You could pull up your account, log in, and hand them your laptop — but you'd rather not.

UnDercontrol's task sharing solves this exact problem. Generate a public link, hand over a short access code, and anyone can view that specific task — your description, notes, attachments, the whole thing — without needing an account or touching your credentials.