About/Contact

I'm building Isla because apparently choosing between "works well" and "doesn't spy on me" is too much to ask from software in 2025.

I live in Notion for work because it's genuinely great—clean interface, blocks that make sense. But every keystroke gets beamed to their servers, and now with their shiny new AI features, asking it to summarize my private notes means handing over my thoughts to get indexed in some data center. Cool.

Obsidian keeps everything local, which I appreciate, but connecting an LLM meant a delightful weekend of Homebrew hell, API key juggling, and enough terminal commands to make me question my life choices. I just wanted to write notes, not become a DevOps engineer.

So Isla is my attempt to have both: the clean, block-based editing that doesn't make me want to throw my laptop, plus Markdown files that live on my actual drive like it's 2005.

The best part? It works completely offline. Thanks to models like Llama 3 and the whole GGUF ecosystem, I can bundle a decent AI right into the app. Type /summarize on a plane with dead wifi? Works. Whisper a voice note from a basement with zero bars? Still works. Your laptop becomes this self-contained AI fortress that doesn't need permission from the internet to think.

No "oops, connection timeout" messages. No waiting for some server in Virginia to wake up. No wondering if your personal thoughts are getting fed into the next quarterly earnings call about "user engagement metrics."

It's 2025. We can run solid AI models on laptops now. There's literally no reason your note-taking app should need to phone home every time you want to organize your thoughts. Isla is my middle finger to that whole paradigm.

Let me know what you think! Thanks :)