Write with AI.
Stay the writer.
Iliad is a beautiful markdown editor with an agent inside. It works in your document, under your eye — never instead of you. One window, not three; plain files on your disk; free and open source.
Free · MIT · macOS 13+ on Apple Silicon · v0.1.0
The new way to write
A new way of writing is settling in: plain markdown files on your own computer, and an AI that reads and edits them with you. More and more serious writing happens this way — notes, essays, courses, books — because it gives you the agent’s help without giving up your files.
You can assemble that setup from parts: a chat app here, an editor there, something else to figure out what changed. Or you can open one window that was built for it from the first line. Your pick.
Why not a chatbot?
Because writing is judging. Every sentence you keep is one you weighed — read, doubted, trimmed, let stand. That isn’t the chore around writing; it is the writing.
A chatbot can’t honor that. It produces its paragraphs in a window beside your work, and you paste in what you never quite weighed. The text is fine. It just isn’t yours yet — and making it yours means rewriting it where it lives: in your document.
So that’s where Iliad puts the agent. It drafts; you overwrite. It tightens; the change blooms in place, in your file, where reading and fixing are the same gesture. There is no review step. There is only reading on, the way you always have.
The file on disk is always, simply, yours.
A real editor, with an agent under your eye
- Visual markdown
- Syntax hides on inactive lines. Tables, images, links and embeds render in place; drag a picture in and it’s saved beside your document.
- Plain files, forever
- A folder of
.mdfiles on your disk is the whole database. Open it with anything — including whatever comes after Iliad. - Anchored edits
- A typo fix touches the typo and nothing else. Review the agent’s work hunk by hunk, inside the document.
- Your keys, your machine
- Bring an OpenAI API key or your Codex account. Credentials live in local app data and never ship with the app.
- AGENTS.md
- Standing instructions for how the agent should write — kept in markdown, next to the work itself.
- Process receipts
- Every turn shows what the agent read, what it searched, and what it left out.
- Focus mode
- The sidebar slips away. Just the page, and you.
- A folder, not a vault
- Any other app — or any other agent — can open the same folder. Iliad never gets between you and your files.
- English & Español
- The whole interface, both ways. Your words stay exactly as you wrote them.
- Telegram, read-only
- Ask about your workspace from your phone, through a relay you deploy yourself.
Get Iliad
Iliad MD 0.1.0 — macOS 13+ on Apple Silicon. Signed and notarized.
Free and open source under the MIT license. The agent asks for your own OpenAI key or Codex login in Settings — nothing phones home, and your prose goes only where you send it — to the provider you chose, on your own key, never to us. On Intel or Windows? Watch the repo: new builds land there first.