# Hubble Hubble is a free, open source notetaking app built on [[Markdown]] and HTML, by Ben Holmes (`@bholmesdev`). [[MIT License]], TypeScript, [[Electron]], desktop-first. Its tagline is the whole pitch: *"The best notepad for you and your agents."* That last clause is the reason I'm writing this down. Plenty of apps store notes as Markdown. This one treats a coding agent as a first-class writer alongside you, and builds the app around that assumption instead of bolting it on afterwards. ## Three claims **Feels familiar.** The writing experience is Notion-shaped: `/` commands, Markdown shortcuts, frontmatter as file properties. Built on Tiptap with Markdown conversion underneath. The bet is that most people don't want a Markdown editor, they want the [[Notion]] editing feel with Markdown files on disk. **Agent ready.** Point your agent at the notes folder and start working. Hubble live-reloads as the agent edits. No plugin, no API, no sync protocol; the folder is the interface and the app just stops fighting you about it. **Build any view.** Past plain Markdown you can build HTML-based apps inside your notes. Install the companion skills, tell your coding agent what you want, and a folder of notes becomes a table, a bookshelf, a map, whatever. The runtime for those apps and embeds ships as its own package. ## What's actually there A pnpm monorepo. The desktop [[Electron]] app is the real product; there's an Astro landing page, and a React plus Convex browser version marked *heavily WIP*. Packages split out a framework-agnostic editor core, shared UI, the HTML-app runtime, a filesystem sync engine (also *heavily WIP*), a Convex sync backend for cloud sync, and a `hubble` CLI for syncing a folder from the terminal. macOS, Windows and Linux builds. macOS is signed and notarised; the other two aren't, so expect an OS warning on first launch. First commit February 2026, still moving. Read the *heavily WIP* labels as what they are. Sync is the hard part of every notes app, and here it's unfinished in two places at once. ## The repo runs on agents too Worth noting separately, because it's a second idea hiding inside the first. Hubble's repository automation runs on Warp Factory agents: new issues get triaged with a readiness label and an explanation, anything labelled `ready-to-implement` gets a draft pull request, and every PR gets an agent code review before a human sees it. The part I respect is the disclosure. Every agent-authored comment, review and PR is signed with a link back to Warp, so you can always tell what a person wrote and what a machine wrote. That's a small convention with a lot of leverage, and most projects doing this aren't doing it. ## The reception 151 points on Hacker News on 29 July 2026, and the thread is a useful lesson in something other than Hubble. The top comment is fair: the landing page doesn't do enough to justify another notetaking app, and the burden of proof is high. Everything under it collapses into an argument about whether a desktop app should be written in Rust rather than Node, complete with someone being sarcastic about LLMs and half the replies missing it. Almost nobody discussed the actual idea. A launch can clear a hundred points and still tell you nothing, and if the pitch doesn't land in the first screen, the thread will happily debate your tech stack instead. ## Why I keep this note I run [[Obsidian]] with the [[Obsidian Starter Kit]] and a stack of skills, so I'm not switching. That's exactly why this is worth watching. **It's the same bet I've made, made natively.** I got agent-writable notes by pointing Claude at my vault and building the tooling around it. Hubble starts from "an agent is a co-author" and designs from there. Same destination, opposite direction, and the second one is what a purpose-built tool looks like when the assumption is baked in from day one. **"Build any view" is the piece I'd steal.** Turning a folder of notes into a bookshelf or a map by asking an agent, with skills doing the heavy lifting, is Bases and Dataview with the query language replaced by a conversation. My views are declarative and I maintain them. Theirs are generated on request. There's a real question in there about which ages better. **Signed agent contributions should be standard.** Marking which artifacts came from an agent, with a link back, costs almost nothing and answers the provenance question before anyone asks it. That convention belongs anywhere agents touch shared work, including my own repos. The honest position: Obsidian's plugin ecosystem and my accumulated vault are the moat, and no new app crosses that in a year. But an editor designed for human and agent from the first commit is a different starting point, and starting points compound. ## References - [hubble.md](https://hubble.md) — home - [bholmesdev/hubble.md](https://github.com/bholmesdev/hubble.md) — source - [Latest release](https://github.com/bholmesdev/hubble.md/releases/latest) — macOS, Windows, Linux - [bholmesdev/hubble-skills](https://github.com/bholmesdev/hubble-skills) — the agent skills for building views - [Hacker News discussion (151 points, 2026-07-29)](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49091730) - [Ben Holmes (@bholmesdev)](https://twitter.com/bholmesdev) — author - [Warp Factory agents](https://www.warp.dev/oz) — what runs the repo automation ## Related - [[Obsidian]] - [[Obsidian Starter Kit]] - [[Markdown]] - [[Notion]] - [[Logseq]] - [[AI Agent Skills]] - [[Claude Code]] - [[Electron]] - [[TypeScript]] - [[Open Source]] - [[MIT License]]