Closed-source software asks us to trust what we cannot inspect. We want to build differently.
Three months ago, my co-founder and I quit our jobs to build Meridian full-time. It is an open-source, local-first AI work journal that runs on your device, captures your development activity, and drafts clear worklogs and updates for tools like Jira. Nothing leaves your device until you approve it.
Meridian is MIT-licensed and free for individual developers. Your thoughts and support would be really helpful
Mine was Semrush's Authority Score. It went from 2 to 5 in a few weeks on a side project and I read it as progress.
Then I pulled the backlink list instead of trusting the summary number. 116 referring domains, up from before. The count of real follow links, the ones search engines actually treat as a vote, was exactly 4. Same as three weeks earlier. Not one more.
Building a desktop site generator and thinking about the pricing model. Are people still willing to pay a one time fee for desktop software in 2026, or is everyone just used to subscriptions now? What s your take?
