Melody
A command-first research terminal for public companies.
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Design and engineering
- Stack
- TypeScript · SEC EDGAR · Node · Playwright
The problem
The same question as Proof-Lens, pointed at a different record: a filing is only worth reading if you can see where it came from and how old it is. Most tools show you the number and hide both.
Research tools for public companies are built around dashboards. Dashboards are good at showing you what someone else decided was important, and bad at answering a specific question quickly. If you already know what you want, a dashboard is in your way.
The approach
Melody inverts it. You type what you want and the answer streams back.
- Primary sources. SEC filings direct from EDGAR, not a summarised feed.
- Delayed market data, clearly labelled as delayed — the honest presentation matters more than the freshness.
- Command-first. Keyboard is the primary interface; the UI exists to display results, not to be navigated.
What was hard
Filing data is messy in ways that resist generic parsing — the same concept is tagged differently across filers and across years. Most of the work is in the normalisation layer that sits between EDGAR and anything a user sees.
What I'd change
Normalisation is where nearly all of the work went and where the remaining problems live. Filers tag the same concept differently, and the same filer changes how it does so between years, so a mapping that looks complete against recent filings quietly degrades the further back you go. What I would change is not the mapping but the reporting around it: the interface should say when a figure came through a fallback path rather than a direct match, in the same way it already says when data is delayed.
The command-first claim deserves testing rather than asserting. Once several panels are open, reaching for the pointer is genuinely faster for some things, and the interesting question is which — that is a usage question I never instrumented and should have.
Labelling market data as delayed costs the tool any use case that depends on being current, which is most of the ones people expect from something that looks like a terminal. I would still make the same call. A research tool that is quietly stale is worse than one that is loudly late.