What this is, and what it is not

Last updated 23 September 2026

Cadent is a macOS app I built for my own coursework and share with other students. This page describes what it does, what it cannot do for you, and what I ask of you in return.

1. What Cadent is

Cadent is a macOS application that reads your own course materials and proposes a plan for your work.

Cadent is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any university, including the University of North Carolina. It is not affiliated with Instructure (Canvas) or Microsoft.

2. Who it is for

Cadent is for students aged 13 and up, and you need an invite to sign in. Keep access to the email address you signed in with, since that is how your library is tied to you.

3. Your material stays yours

You keep every right in the coursework, documents and text you bring to Cadent. The only permission it needs is the permission to run:

• to process your material on your machine; and
• to send it to the AI providers named in the privacy note: the whole text of a document once, when Cadent first reads it, so that it can be searched later, and the relevant passages again whenever you ask a question or Cadent builds your plan.

The privacy note describes both in detail. Nothing you give Cadent is stored on a server of mine, I claim no ownership of anything you write or upload, and none of it is used to train models.

4. What Cadent does not promise

Cadent is a planning aid, not an authority on your coursework.

• Plans, deadlines and estimates are generated from documents you provide and can be wrong. Check anything that matters against your syllabus and your instructor.
• Answers from Ask Cadent cite the material they came from. Read the citation. A confident answer is not a correct one.
• Cadent can miss an assignment, misread a date, or misjudge how long something takes. It does not replace your own judgement about your degree.

You are responsible for your own work and your own deadlines. A missed assignment is not something the app can make right.

5. What I ask of you

Please do not:

• share your account or your invite with someone else;
• try to extract credentials or tokens from the app;
• use Cadent to break your university's academic integrity rules; it exists to help you plan and understand your work, not to produce work you submit as your own;
• upload material you have no right to share;
• attempt to overwhelm, probe or disrupt it.

6. Your connected accounts

When you connect Canvas or Outlook, you authorise Cadent to read on your behalf using credentials you supply. You must have the right to grant that access, and you must follow those services' own terms. You can disconnect at any time in Settings.

For Canvas this includes downloading and reading PDF files attached to your courses, the schedules and reading lists instructors post as documents. Cadent reads with your own credentials, so it can open nothing you could not open yourself, and it downloads no other kind of file. The privacy note describes exactly what it takes and where it goes.

7. It is still being built

Cadent is under active development. Features may change or be removed, it may be unavailable, and it may lose data. Keep your own record of anything you cannot afford to lose.

8. Stopping

You can stop at any time: delete the app, and email me if you want your account record removed.

9. Contact

Email me at support@cadent.work.