OpenLabs

The idea

Creative software asks for two things before it does anything useful: an account and an upload. Both are there for the vendor, not for you. Browsers have been able to do the actual work for years, and almost nobody builds that way.

OpenLabs is four applications sharing one monorepo, one component library and one rule: everything runs on the user's machine. No sign-up, no server round trip, no file leaving the tab. Each ships as a PWA, so each works with the network off.

The four

OpenSketch is a 3D modeller in the shape of SketchUp. Underneath it is a half-edge boundary-representation kernel, so the mesh is topologically correct rather than a bag of triangles, which is what makes push/pull, follow-me and offset behave. It has an inference engine for endpoint, midpoint, on-edge and axis snapping, four render styles, and exports to glTF, GLB, OBJ and STL.

OpenPaint is a raster editor: layers with blend modes, brush and shape tools, rectangular, lasso and magic-wand selection, gradients, text, and a hundred-step command history. Its AI features (background removal, sketch to image, layer splitting) run against a key you paste in yourself.

OpenMix is a two-deck DJ mixer. BPM and key detection run locally through ONNX, and it puts the results on a Camelot wheel so it can tell you which tracks are compatible. It has per-deck reverb, delay, filter, flanger and phaser, records the mix to WebM, plays live-coded drum patterns through Strudel, and can generate music with Lyria.

OpenBrand plans an Instagram grid inside a phone mockup, with a local image library in IndexedDB and a plan you can compress into a URL hash and send to somebody.

The shared spine

Four apps with the same problems is what makes a monorepo worth it. Undo/redo is one command-pattern implementation. The AI assistant is one panel that talks to Claude, OpenAI or Gemini, with the key encrypted locally and never sent anywhere but the provider. The file dialogs, the settings, the keyboard-shortcut layer and the offline shell are shared.

The constraint that everything is client-side is what makes the whole thing cheap to run and, more usefully, what makes it honest: there is no server that could be looking at your files, because there is no server.