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[ARTICLE · art-19968] src=dev.to pub= topic=ai-products verified=true sentiment=↑ positive

Created a developer excuse generator with 6 situations, 4 tones, and custom excuses

A developer built Excusify, an open-source excuse generator that offers 72 hand-written excuses across six engineering situations and four tones. The tool, live at excusify.vercel.app, also provides AI-generated custom excuses via the Claude API and features shareable URLs, keyboard shortcuts, and a seed-based daily excuse.

read3 min publishedJun 3, 2026

We've all been there. Standup starts in 3 minutes. The bug is still there.

The deploy failed. The PR has been sitting unreviewed for two days.

And "I don't know" just isn't professional enough.

So I built Excusify. Pick your situation, pick your tone, get a believable excuse.

Copy it. Send it. Survive the standup.

Live at excusify.vercel.app - open source, MIT licensed.

Pick from 6 built-in engineering situations, choose a tone, and get a context-aware excuse

instantly. Every generated excuse gets its own shareable URL. There's an Excuse of the Day

that's seed-based — same excuse for everyone on the same date.

72 hand-written excuses across all situation + tone combinations. Plus AI generation for

anything custom via the Claude API.

6 built-in situations:

Situation For when...
Bug still exists It was working on your machine
Missed deadline Scope was definitely not creep
Production went down It was like that when you got there
PR not reviewed You've only pinged them 4 times
Deploy failed CI/CD had other plans
Missed standup You were "in deep focus work"

4 tones:

Option How
Download PNG
Tweet-ready image card via html2canvas
Twitter / LinkedIn
One-click native share compose
Slack / WhatsApp
Pre-formatted deep links
Copy as Slack block
Paste-ready bold + quoted format
Shareable URL
Unique link per excuse encoded in URL params

The built-in 72 excuses cover the classics. But for truly unique situations —

the cursed legacy codebase, the third rebase in a day, the meeting that could have been

an email — there's a custom input that hits the Claude API and generates a fresh,

believable excuse on the spot.

Star your best excuses, they persist to localStorage

. History shows your last 10

with a "show all" toggle. Cap prevents localStorage bloat.

Space

to generate, C

to copy, F

to favorite, S

/T

to focus pickers,

?

to show the shortcuts overlay. Full keyboard flow if you never want to touch the mouse.

Subtle synthesized audio feedback on generate via the Web Audio API.

No external sound files — generated entirely in-browser.

Seed-based daily excuse — same one for every user on the same date.

Opens up a shared experience: "did you see today's excuse?"

Tracks total excuses generated across all sessions.

A completely useless metric that somehow feels important.

Tool Purpose
React + Vite Component architecture and build tooling
Tailwind CSS Utility-first styling, dark/light theme
html2canvas DOM-to-PNG export for share cards
Web Audio API Synthesized sound effects, no external files
Claude API AI-powered custom excuse generation
Vercel Deployment
git clone https://github.com/byllzz/excusify.git
cd excusify
npm install
npm run dev

Got a better excuse? Found a tone that's missing? Open a PR.

Good first contributions:

situations.js

and excuses.js

tones.js

git checkout -b feat/your-feature
git commit -m "feat: your short description"
git push origin feat/your-feature

Keep PRs focused — one feature or fix per PR.

If Excusify saved your standup - a ⭐ on the GitHub repo

means a lot. Drop your favourite generated excuse in the comments below!

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