Hey everyone, I’m building Kallamo, an open-source desktop app for AI-assisted writing and storytelling. It’s BYOK, so you bring your own API key and talk directly to the provider you choose. Nothing is routed through me.

The problem I care most about is not getting an AI to write one nice paragraph. It is keeping a long project coherent through chapters, rewrites, character changes, and months of work.

Kallamo’s **Writing Desk** is the center of the app. I wanted it to feel like a proper writing environment first, not a chat box with a document attached. Your manuscript is continuous, the current text remains the source of truth, and the AI supports the work rather than taking it over.

The core interaction is **Select → Invoke**. Select the exact passage you want help with, then invoke an AI action on that selection. It can suggest text to insert, replace only the selected passage, or analyze it.

That last part matters to me. AI help should not always mean “rewrite this for me.” You might want feedback on clarity, dialogue, pacing, character voice, or what a reader may infer from a paragraph. The goal is to make AI a useful writing tool while you remain the writer. It should never take the pen out of your hand.

The other half is memory. Long-form writing gets messy when AI loses track of an old reveal, changes a relationship, forgets what a character knows, or contradicts established events. Kallamo retrieves relevant context for a request instead of dumping your entire project history into every prompt.

There is also **Worldbuild**, a living reference that works alongside the Writing Desk:

* Characters, locations, factions, items, races, creatures, events, and systems
* Aliases, so the AI recognizes different names for the same character
* One-way labeled relationships, such as loyalty, debts, family ties, or who knows what
* Lore that grows with the story instead of becoming a static document you forget to update

For writers, it is a practical continuity tool behind the manuscript. It also works independently for roleplay campaigns, where relationships and events need the same care.

There are two related but distinct workflows. **Proposed Entities** handles something new appearing in text or conversation, such as a character, place, item, or event. **Update Entities** handles changes to something already in the world, such as a changed status, a developing relationship, or new lore. You review every proposal before accepting it. Nothing silently changes your canon.

Kallamo also lets you personalize the workspace. Each chat workspace can have its own background image, backdrop opacity, and separate opacity controls for your messages and the AI’s. Across the app, you can choose an accent color, font family, text scale, and backdrop blur. In the Writing Desk, you can choose a fixed formatting toolbar or one that appears over your selection, and enable or disable smart typography.

I have spent a lot of recent development time on memory because that is the part I distrust most in AI writing tools. A short demo can look great. The real test is whether it still holds together after a project has accumulated real history.

I’m looking for writers willing to try it on an actual project and tell me what writing in it feels like. Does the Writing Desk help you stay in flow? Does Select → Invoke feel natural? What would make the experience more useful without making the AI intrusive?

You can find the app, source code, and Discord here: [https://kallamo.github.io/](https://kallamo.github.io/)

Kallamo, a desktop writing app for stories that need to remember (looking for writers/testers)