I Gave Things 3 an AI Agent (Because Things 4 Is Still "Any Decade Now")

I love Things 3. Unreasonably. I've run my entire life through it for a decade: the company, the fundraise, marathon training blocks, motorcycle trips, groceries. It is the calmest, most carefully made piece of software I own.

It also hasn't had a major version since 2017.

That's not a dunk. It's just the Cultured Code way. Things 1 shipped in 2008. Things 2 in 2012. Things 3 in 2017. Do the math on Things 4 and you land somewhere between "eventually" and "any decade now." Meanwhile it's 2026: I have an AI agent that writes half my code, and a to-do app that can't hear it. No boards. No time-blocking. No command palette. No natural-language input.

So I stopped waiting and built the update myself, from the outside.

Meet SUUR Things

SUUR Things is a free, open-source MCP server and local dashboard for Things 3 on macOS. It does two jobs.

1. It gives any AI agent safe, structured access to your tasks. Connect it to Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, or any MCP client with one command:

claude mcp add suurthings -- uvx suur-things-mcp

Then ask "what should I work on today?" and watch your agent answer from your actual Today list, like a chief of staff. It can capture in natural language ("add pick up race bib friday 4pm, tag errand"), turn an implementation plan into a full Things project in one call, sweep a codebase's TODO comments into real to-dos, and triage a messy Inbox, proposing changes you review before anything is written.

2. It gives you the views Things never shipped. A local dashboard (uvx suur-things-mcp dashboard) that looks faithfully like Things but adds: Kanban boards where each card is a whole project, an Eisenhower matrix on any list, P1–P4 priority levels powered by your own tags, a 6am–11pm time-blocking timeline for Today, a ⌘K command palette, YouTube-thumbnail cards for link-heavy projects, and git repo links with a commit/PR pulse for developer projects.

The one design decision that matters

Cultured Code's own AI-integration guidance is blunt: writing directly to the Things database is unsafe and can corrupt it. So SUUR Things never does.

• Reads come from the local SQLite database, opened strictly read-only.
• Writes go exclusively through the official things:/// URL Scheme, the same mechanism Things documents for Shortcuts and AppleScript.

Which means an agent connected to this server physically cannot corrupt your Things data, no matter what it does. The dashboard's extra concepts (boards, quadrants, time-blocks) live in a local overlay file that is never written into Things. Delete it and Things is exactly as you left it.

No cloud, no account, no telemetry. The dashboard binds to 127.0.0.1 and your data never leaves your Mac. One honest caveat: an agent you connect can read task content and send it to its model. That's your agent's privacy policy, not ours. We don't have one. There's nothing to collect.

What you need

• Things 3 for Mac. This is a companion for your existing Things database, not a replacement. No Things, nothing to see.
• macOS. Both the database and the URL Scheme are Mac-only.
• uv (or Python 3.10+). uvx runs it with zero setup.

Try it

The full story, with screenshots of every view, lives on the SUUR Things page. The code, docs, and install guide are on GitHub. It's MIT-licensed; if it makes your Things calmer or your agent smarter, a star helps other Things people find it.

Stop waiting for Things 4.