I have used Things 3 for the better part of a decade. It is still, to my eye, the most beautiful to-do app ever made — calm, keyboard-first, with a sense of restraint nobody else manages. And in 2026 it still has no AI. No assistant, no natural-language anything beyond date parsing, no way to connect it to the tools the rest of my work now runs on.
That used to be fine. It isn’t anymore — and after one more year of waiting for an update that never came, I moved. Here’s what I was actually looking for, in case you’re in the same spot.
The gap isn’t “a chatbot in the corner”
When people hear “AI to-do app” they picture a bolted-on chat panel that suggests you “break this into subtasks.” That’s not the gap. The gap is that my to-do list became an island while everything around it learned to talk to AI. My editor, my terminal, my notes — all of them can now reach an assistant. My tasks couldn’t.
What I wanted was simple to say and apparently hard to find: a list I could talk to, that my own AI could read and write, and that could occasionally do the work itself.
Three things Things can’t do
1. Capture and triage by conversation. “Invoice Acme Friday, remind me at nine, file it under Clients.” In Things that’s four manual steps. In an AI-native app it’s one sentence. Multiply that by every task you add in a week and it’s not a small difference.
2. Connect to my AI. This is the big one. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets AI clients like Claude and Cursor talk to your tools directly. A to-do app with an MCP server means I can sit in my editor and say “what’s overdue in the Acme project” and get a real answer from my real list. Things has no MCP, no API, nothing to plug into.
3. Hand a task off. Some of my to-dos are just scoped work — a refactor, a draft, a bit of research. I wanted to assign those to an AI agent and review the result, the way you’d delegate to a junior teammate. A static list can’t do that by definition.
What I didn’t want to give up
Here’s the catch: most “powerful” task managers are ugly or overwhelming. Motion buries you in auto-scheduling. ClickUp is a cockpit. I didn’t want to trade Things’ calm for a dashboard. The whole point was to keep the feel — Today, Upcoming, Anytime, Someday; quick entry; projects and areas; the keyboard flow — and add intelligence underneath it.
That combination turns out to be rare. Most apps are either beautiful and dumb, or smart and exhausting. The thing I switched to (full disclosure, it’s Lume, which I now build) was an attempt to refuse that trade: the Things design language, plus an assistant, plus MCP, plus agent hand-off, plus a web app so I’m not locked to Apple.
Should you switch?
If Things makes you happy and you never wish it talked to your AI, stay — genuinely. It’s a great app and there’s no shame in a tool that just works.
But if you’ve felt the island problem — if you’ve found yourself copy-pasting tasks into a chat window, or wishing your list could be reached from the AI you already use — that itch isn’t going away, and Things isn’t going to scratch it. After ten years I decided I’d rather have the calm and the intelligence than keep waiting for one to grow into the other.
You can see the side-by-side on the Things 3 alternative page, or just try a list that talks back.