steilerdev/cornerstone

cornerstone

A self-hosted home building project management tool for homeowners. Track work items, manage budgets across multiple financing sources, visualize your timeline on a Gantt chart, and organize everything by area and trade -- all from a single Docker container backed by SQLite. No external database or cloud service required.

[!NOTE] This project is completely written using an Agentic Developmen Workflow with Claude Code and Docker Sandbox VMs.

It is a playground to better understand how to fully utilize the coding capabilities of modern LLMs, while applying Software Engineering best practices to create quality and maintainable code. My plan is to write as little code as possible by hand, but rely on a set of agents to build this application.

The project scope is time-limited (I'm currently in need for this tool and probably won't be after) and feature limited - which is why I'm not necessarily concerned about long-term maintainability and/or overall code quality.

After having spend a couple of weeks on this project, I'm both blown away by the LLM capabilities, while still feeling that things don't move as fast and reliable as I would like them to be.

Key learnings so far:

• In order to coding agents to produce good work, verification is very important.
• Good work will cost a lot of tokens!
• Clearly defining the process through skills and agents simplifies the UX for the developer and ensures coding happens along a happy path.
• Parallel work is important - using git worktrees for this should be natively supported by coding agents.
• Running coding agents on your host is dangerous! They can (and will) go wild and perform tasks that you would have never thought of and they are clever in bypassing restrictions. An isolated environment is crucial to provide agents with clear restrictions and reduce the blast radius in case something goes wrong - Coding Agent Governance will be a critical capability moving forward!
• In order to follow a policy, it needs correct enforcement - nicely asking an agent to follow it will not always work: Make sure your CI, Repository and Deployment process have enforced quality gates with no way for the agent to bypass them .

https://steilerDev.github.io/cornerstone/

Features

• Work Items -- Manage construction tasks with statuses, dates, area assignments, notes, subtasks, dependencies, and keyboard shortcuts -- every work item shows its full area ancestor path (e.g. House / Ground Floor / Kitchen) as a breadcrumb across lists, detail pages, pickers, and every place it is referenced
• Areas & Trades -- Organize your project with hierarchical areas (rooms, floors, zones) and trade specialties (Electrical, Plumbing, etc.) for vendors; a dedicated "No Area" filter surfaces items that have not been classified yet
• Budget Management -- Budget categories, financing sources with inline expansion and mass-move of attached lines, multi-budget-line invoice linking with itemized amounts, subsidies with caps, quotation tracking, and an area-grouped overview dashboard with clickable summary tiles and print-friendly export
• Timeline & Gantt Chart -- Interactive Gantt chart with dependency arrows, critical path, zoom controls, milestones, and CPM-based auto-scheduling
• Calendar View -- Monthly and weekly calendar grids with work items and milestones
• Household Items -- Track furniture, appliances, and fixtures with categories, area assignment, delivery scheduling, budget integration, and work item linking
• Project Dashboard -- At-a-glance project health with budget, timeline, invoice, and subsidy cards, mini Gantt preview, and customizable layout
• Construction Diary -- Daily logs, site visits, delivery records, automatic system events, photo attachments, and digital signature capture
• Document Integration -- Browse and link documents from Paperless-ngx to work items, household items, and invoices
• Advanced List Views -- Filter, sort, paginate, and customize columns across all list pages with the shared DataTable system
• Backup & Restore -- Manual and scheduled backups with configurable retention, restore from the settings UI
• Internationalization -- English and German language support with automatic locale detection, including translated category names
• Authentication -- Local accounts with setup wizard, OIDC single sign-on
• User Management -- Admin and Member roles, admin panel
• Dark Mode -- Light, Dark, or System theme

Quick Start

bash
docker run -d \
  --name cornerstone \
  -p 3000:3000 \
  -v cornerstone-data:/app/data \
  steilerdev/cornerstone:latest

Open http://localhost:3000 -- the setup wizard will guide you through creating your admin account. See the https://steilerDev.github.io/cornerstone/getting-started/docker-setup for Docker Compose, reverse proxy, and OIDC configuration.

Roadmap

• EPIC-02: Application Shell and Infrastructure
• EPIC-11: CI/CD Infrastructure
• EPIC-01: Authentication and User Management
• EPIC-03: Work Items
• EPIC-12: Design System Bootstrap
• EPIC-05: Budget Management
• EPIC-06: Timeline and Gantt Chart
• EPIC-08: Paperless-ngx Integration
• EPIC-04: Household Items
• EPIC-07: Reporting and Export
• EPIC-10: UX Polish and Accessibility
• EPIC-11: Unified Tag and Category System
• EPIC-12: Codebase Refinement and Consistency
• EPIC-14: Cross-Entity Code Deduplication
• EPIC-15: Budget-Line Invoice Linking Rework
• EPIC-09: Dashboard and Overview
• EPIC-13: Construction Diary
• EPIC-17: Internationalization (English + German)
• EPIC-18: Areas & Trades
• DataTable & List View Overhaul
• Backup & Restore
• EPIC-16: Floor Plans & Utility Tracking

Track live progress on the https://github.com/users/steilerDev/projects/4.

Documentation

Contributing

Cornerstone is a personal project built primarily through an agentic development workflow. If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to https://github.com/steilerDev/cornerstone/issues.

License

This project is not currently published under an open-source license.