AI will finally end the note editor

Every programmer builds a notes app at some point. It's the second project after the todo list, the college assignment that never really ends. So the world has hundreds of them - Evernote, OneNote, Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Bear, Logseq, Workflowy, Apple Notes, and a new one on the HackerNews front page every other week. Entire YouTube careers exist just comparing them.

And yet everyone I know is still searching for "their" notes app. Switching every year or two, migrating notes, losing formatting, starting over.

Why does no notes app win. I've come to believe it's because note taking is the most personal software category there is. Outliner or freeform. Tags or folders or no organisation at all. Plain text or rich text. Daily notes or zettelkasten. Local files or cloud. Keyboard-everything or touch-first. Every combination has its tribe, and every app in the market is really one founder's combination, generalised and then monetised. The generalisation makes it fit nobody perfectly, and the monetisation eventually ruins whatever fit remained - I've written already about what happened to Evernote's pricing once its users were locked in.

For thirty years the economics forced this. Building an app took a team and a funding round, so the only apps that existed were ones that could justify a market of millions. Your personal whims never justified a market of one.

AI just changed that equation. What used to be a startup is now a weekend.

I know because I did it. EverFree started as my own itch - I wanted notes as plain markdown files in a git repo I own, an assistant that rewrites text in place with Cmd K and chats about my notes with Cmd L, dictation that works in both Hindi and English, and a one-time import of my decade of Evernote baggage. No product manager weighed these against a roadmap. They are just my preferences, shipped. Almost all of it was vibe-coded - I described what I wanted and the AI wrote most of the code. The whole thing would have been a seed-funded startup in 2015. It was a few weekends in 2026.

Robin Sloan wrote a lovely essay years ago saying an app can be a home-cooked meal - made for the few people you love, not for a market (robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app). It read as a charming curiosity back then, because home cooking still required you to be a chef. AI coding removed that requirement. Anyone who can describe what they want can now cook.

So here is my prediction for the category. The notes app war doesn't end with a winner. It ends with a million personal one-offs, each fitting exactly one person, all sitting on open formats. The editor becomes disposable - rebuild it, fork it, throw it away next year. The notes become permanent - plain text and markdown survive every app that ever hosted them. Which is the correct arrangement, because the editor was never the valuable part. Your notes were. The industry just had it inverted for thirty years, and priced it accordingly.

The best notes app won't come from a company. You'll build it yourself some weekend soon, per your own whim. Mine is called EverFree, and it's open source - fork it if your whims are close to mine, or just take the notes format and cook your own.