solo.ist
tools for the personal software era

AI labs are shipping frontier models that are inverting the physics of software engineering, capable of creating SaaS-grade software in a fraction of the time and cost. What used to take months happens in weeks, or weeks of work are condensed into a few hours. Meanwhile, open-weight and open-source models continue to become cheaper, more capable, and more accessible.

The barriers of entry for those without experience building software are lower than ever, opening up a new open source participation economy, while software engineers with the knowledge of what it takes to build good software are able to accelerate novel ideas on stronger foundations.

The assumptions of value that used to gate good software behind subscriptions and justified the existence of SaaS are quietly collapsing.

In that world, it's all about the why we build what we build. Ideas are everything. solo.ist is an experiment to find out what personal software looks like when it's truly personal, generated for your own needs.

projects
Projects
Prose solo.ist/prose Live
A free, open-source markdown editor for the AI era. AI knowledge workers know that markdown is at the center of everything. Prose reimagines the humble markdown editor with a clean, minimal, and elegant base, while providing optional AI that doesn't strive to write for you. Chat, Editor, and Create modes put you in control, suggestion review lets you keep up with AI suggestions, and Activity History and in-document provenance annotations keep track of everything that's happened. It's local-first, so your files are plain .md (or .txt). The open-source build goes further: an MCP server lets Claude Desktop read and edit your documents and interact with the app.

Prose is one expression of the solo.ist idea of personal software. Why pay for Obsidian or iA Writer, when you can roll your own, or fork a solid starting point.

Most importantly, this app exists because it can, and you can make it exactly what you'd like.
Electron TipTap MCP reMarkable MIT
solo.ist/prose ↗ GitHub ↗
More coming. Soon
Coming Soon: Solo the Robot.
GitHub ↗
Built by me, Angel Marino.

solo.ist is the home for tools I build because I want them and the version I need or want doesn't exist. Everything is open source, MIT licensed, and designed to work for humans and agents alike.

Tools for the personal software era.

Find me
GitHub ↗ Bluesky ↗ Email ↗