You typed the whole evening into an app once, and then wondered where it went.
Not lost. Sent. The half-thought about the dentist, the money, the row with your sister, all of it went to a server you will never see, to be turned into tidy bullet points by a model you do not own. It did the job. It also changed what you were willing to type next time, and a brain dump you edit before you write it is not a brain dump.
A tool for an ADHD brain has one job
Hold the list the head cannot.
With ADHD it is hard to keep a list in your head. A 2013 meta-analysis of 38 studies of adults found this well supported (Alderson and colleagues, 2013). Everything a to-do app does for this brain comes from one fact: the head is a bad shelf, so the list has to live somewhere else, and the somewhere else has to be trusted completely. The moment you half-trust the shelf, you keep a second copy in your head, and the head is where the list was failing in the first place.
So the question is not which app has the best features. It is which shelf you would put your whole head on.
Hard to trust is the second biggest complaint
We read 2,520 Notion complaints by hand.
In September 2026 we scanned 363,000 posts about Notion and hand-coded 2,520 of them against a list of pains. 37% were about the tool being slow to reach. 27% were about trust: it lost, broke or moved things. 22% said it was too much tool. It is not an ADHD sample, and we say so. The whole picture is here.
One line stood out. People who had left Notion named ownership, "the notes are not mine", far more often than people still using it: 20% of leavers against 3% of stayers. They did not leave over speed. They left because the writing lived somewhere they did not.
A brain dump is the rawest writing you do. It has the row with your sister in it, next to the dentist. The rawer the writing, the more it matters whose disk it sits on.
Why the cloud changes what you type
A model you do not own reads everything you give it.
This is not a scandal. It is how cloud AI runs: your text goes to a server, the server runs the model, the answer comes back. For a polished email it is a fine trade. For a brain dump it is a bad one, because the value of a dump comes from writing without deciding what is fit to be read, and the moment a server is in the loop you start deciding. You leave out the money. You soften the sister. The list gets tidier and the head stays full.
There is also the plainer worry from the Notion data. A list you do not trust is a list you stop using. If the trust is about the tool losing things, you keep a copy in your head. If it is about where the words go, you keep the words in your head. Either way the shelf is empty and the head is not.
How Kaapi does it
The model is a file on your disk.
Kaapi ships Qwen3.5 4B, a 2.74 GB model under the Apache 2.0 licence. It is fetched once from Hugging Face and hash-checked, which means the file on your Mac is checked against a known fingerprint, so the model we tested is the model you have. It runs on your Mac's own chip. On a recent Mac a typed dump turns into tasks in about 4 seconds, and a spoken one in about 9. Nothing you write leaves the Mac. An account is optional.
We did not pick the biggest model. We ran 17 on-device models on 38 hand-checked brain dumps: typed ones, rambles, vague ones, ones full of dates, six "no work here" traps where the right answer was to make no tasks at all, and real transcripts of spoken dumps. We ship the one which came out best on those 38.
The dump itself is one box. You type or say everything, half sentences and typos included, and the model turns it into small tasks with steps. A time you wrote, "by 4pm", "tmrw", "the weekend", becomes the task's deadline. Your dumps and your tasks are files on a computer you own.
The honest cost
Local has a price, and you should know it before you type.
The first is the file. 2.74 GB, downloaded once. On a slow connection it takes a while, and it takes up room. The second is the model's size. A 4B model is small next to the models in the cloud, and a small model can mis-split a step now and then. Two steps become one. A task grows a step you did not mean. It happens, not often, and you can edit any task. We chose it anyway, because a step you have to correct is a small cost and a list you stop trusting is the whole cost.
The third is speed, and it depends on the Mac. The 4 seconds and 9 seconds above are from a recent one.
How to keep your list yours without Kaapi
Own the shelf, whatever the shelf is.
- Keep the dump in a form you can open without the app. Plain text on your own disk survives every company and every update.
- Before you paste a raw dump into a cloud AI, ask if you would say it on a bus. If not, do the sorting by hand, or use a model on your own machine.
- Pick tools where the data sits on your disk first and syncs second, if it syncs at all. When a page comes up blank, you want a file to fall back on.
- Never keep a second copy in your head. If you catch yourself doing it, the shelf has lost your trust. Change shelves; do not try harder.
Frequently asked questions
Does an AI to-do app need to send my notes to the cloud?
No. A model small enough to run on a recent Mac can turn a brain dump into tasks in seconds. The text never leaves the computer. The cost is a model file of a few gigabytes stored once, and a model which now and then splits a step differently from how you would have.
Is a local AI model as good as a cloud one at sorting tasks?
Not at everything. Cloud models are far larger. For turning a ramble into small tasks with steps, a well-chosen local model does the job in seconds, and we measured 17 of them on 38 real dumps before choosing one. The gap shows as an occasional mis-split step, which you can edit.
Why does trust matter more for an ADHD to-do list?
Because the list exists to hold what the head cannot. With ADHD it is hard to keep a list in your head, a finding well supported across 38 studies. A tool you half-trust makes you keep a copy in your head anyway, which puts you back where you started, now with two lists.
Is my brain dump private in Kaapi?
Yes. The model runs on your Mac, your dumps and tasks are saved only on your Mac, and nothing you write leaves it. An account is optional. The model is one 2.74 GB file, fetched once and hash-checked, running on your own chip.
Sources
- Alderson, R. M., Kasper, L. J., Hudec, K. L., and Patros, C. H. G. (2013). Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and working memory in adults: A meta-analytic review. Neuropsychology, 27(3), 287–302. doi.org/10.1037/a0032371
- Kaapi (September 2026). What hurts Notion users: 363,000 posts scanned, 2,520 hand-coded against a 20-pain codebook, double-coded on 88 items with 93% agreement. Sources: r/Notion, nine other subreddits, App Store, Google Play, Trustpilot, Hacker News. Not an ADHD sample.
- Kaapi (2026). Text model bench: 17 on-device models run on 38 hand-checked brain dumps (typed, rambles, vague, dates, six "no work here" traps, real voice transcripts). Shipped: Qwen3.5 4B, 2.74 GB, Apache 2.0, fetched once from Hugging Face and hash-checked; about 4 seconds for a typed dump and 9 for a spoken one on a recent Mac. Our measurement, not a trial.