olai alpha

ஓலை — the palm leaf Tamil was written on for two millennia. Nodes are leaves; your files are the manuscript.

An outliner for people who think the filesystem was right all along.

Self-hosted, AI-native alternative to Workflowy. Your outline is a bunch of #lang olai files in a git repo. You edit them with $EDITOR or point a coding agent at them. A small Racket server renders the tree to your phone. That's it. No cloud, no accounts, no Electron.

github.com/juspay/olai docs/syntax.md docs/cli.md

Why

Workflowy got the data model right (one big tree, mirrors, dates) and the ownership model wrong (their server, their format, their AI). olai inverts it:

tasks are CODE — a Racket #lang; the expander is the validator.
git is the HISTORY — no sync protocol, no CRDT, no vendor.
agents are USERS — Claude Code & friends edit your files; the DSL's error messages are their REPL. The web view spawns one over ACP and puts it in a chat panel.
the web UI is a VIEW — htmx, pushed over SSE: save a file and every open tab redraws itself.

Mirrors fall out of the language for free: a node is a binding, referencing it twice is a mirror. Define-before-use kills most cycles before they exist.

Syntax

Quoteless outline, the flagship surface. Nest with 2 spaces; attach notes and dates under a title.

#lang olai

Inbox #capture
  : Quick capture landing zone
  Buy milk — don't quote me
    @date 2026-08-04T18:00
  [x] Already shipped the pitch
  [/] Wiring the third state
  Agent work ^agent
  Wired the CLI
    @done 2026-08-03
  This week
    *agent          ; a mirror, not a copy

Titles and notes are Markdown at render time (web view only); stored strings stay raw. Check off with [x] or @done — one node, one of them; [/] or @doing is the state in between, and done clears it. A title-trailing ^anchor declares a node; a line that is only *anchor is a mirror of it, reaching anywhere in the loaded tree, @included fragments too.

Under the hood every outline becomes s-expressions. Same expander, same error messages:

#lang olai/sexp
(t "Inbox #capture"
   #:description "Quick capture landing zone"
   (t "Buy milk" #:date "2026-08-04T18:00")
   (t "Wiring the third state" #:doing)
   (t "Already shipped the pitch" #:done)
   (t "Wired the CLI" #:done "2026-08-03"))

Agents are the primary CLI users

They are the only ones. Every command replies in JSON — always, with or without --json, which is still accepted and does nothing — and errors are the error object on stderr. Exit codes are contract: 0 ok, 1 usage, 2 the outline said no, 3 file not found. JSON fields are append-only within a version. No ANSI, no terminal tree, no plain mode — the human view is the web app.

$ olai tree examples/Example.rkt
{
  "version": 1,
  "file": ".../Example.rkt",
  "tasks": [
    {
      "title": "Inbox #capture",
      "date": null,
      "description": "Quick capture landing zone",
      "done": null,
      "doing": null,
      "status": "open",
      "id": null,
      "key": "pd076e677",
      "tags": ["capture"],
      "children": [ ... ]
    }
  ],
  "anchors": { "agent": { "title": "Agent work", ... } },
  "task_count": 12, "mirror_count": 1, "anchor_count": 1
}

key is a node's stable identity — its ^anchor, else a hash of its defining file plus the ordinals that reach it. It survives renaming the node or any ancestor. The web view addresses nodes by it.

command	what it does
`check`	validate the module(s); the language is the only validator
`tree`	the task forest
`add`, `done`, `doing`, `move`, `daily`	the write path — auto-commits when the file's dir is a git work tree
`serve`	the web view

The view

olai serve renders your outline over htmx and pushes changes over SSE: a file moves on disk, every open tab redraws with no refresh. It is installable as a PWA (manifest, icons, theme-color) — live view only, no offline shell, so it still wants the network. No auth; the network is the auth, so bind it to localhost or put it behind Tailscale or Caddy.

The page itself writes nothing yet. Capture and check-off in the browser are next; until then the chat panel — Claude Code driven over the Agent Client Protocol, one turn at a time — is how you change an outline without an editor.

$OLAI_HOME/*.rkt                 <- personal data (#lang olai)
    |                                 ^
    v                                 | edits your files
olai CLI (Racket)                     |   <- validate / query / capture
    |                                 |
    v                                 |
racket web-server --- spawns ---> ACP agent (JSON-RPC on stdio)
    |
    +-- SSE ---> browser (htmx): a file moved, or the agent said something

Run it

With Nix, nothing to install:

$ nix run github:juspay/olai              # the web view, on :8080
$ nix run github:juspay/olai#cli -- check Tasks.rkt   # the CLI

Or from a clone:

$ nix develop        # racket 9.2 + just; or install them yourself
$ just install       # gregor + markdown, then --link olai/
$ just serve         # $OLAI_HOME on http://127.0.0.1:8080
$ just check         # validates $OLAI_HOME/*.rkt
$ just tree examples/Example.rkt

To leave it running, the flake ships a home-manager module — a systemd user unit on Linux, a launchd agent on macOS. It puts the CLI on your PATH too, so the binary you query with cannot skew from the service you read:

# inputs.olai.url = "github:juspay/olai";
{
  imports = [ olai.homeManagerModules.default ];
  services.olai = {
    enable = true;
    dataDir = "${config.home.homeDirectory}/outlines";  # required
    # host = "127.0.0.1";  port = 8080;   the defaults
  };
}

Your data lives outside the repo: point OLAI_HOME at the directory holding your *.rkt outlines. There is no default — unset, the write commands say so, and the repo serves its own examples/ plus Roadmap.rkt instead. Sync that directory however you like: git, Dropbox, rsync. Single user, many devices.

Status

Alpha — the author's daily driver, and nobody else's yet. No release, no version number, no upgrade path promised: this is a repo you clone at a commit. Nothing here is a product.

What works today: outline #lang olai + sexp core + agent CLI. Done status, mirrors and @include composition are first class. The web view reloads on file change, pushes over SSE, installs as a PWA, and carries the chat panel. What does not: the page writes nothing — capture and check-off in the browser are still to come — there is no static HTML export, no auth, and no multi-user story (there will not be one; it is single user by design). Ancestor: srid/Tend.

The project tracks its own plan the way it wants you to track yours: Roadmap.rkt at the repo root is a #lang olai outline, edited and committed like any other file.