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Litho

Private beta

lithoapp.com

// 01. The product

Litho is an AI document-design desktop app for macOS and Windows that I built independently, end to end. Instead of prompting a chatbot and pasting the output into a design tool, you work with agents that generate and edit live visual documents directly - and everything stays on your machine.

The Litho editor: an AI-generated visual document open for live editing

// 02. How it works

01Describe the document

You describe what you need - a proposal, a one-pager, a brand deck - and Litho's agents generate a live visual document, not a wall of markdown. The document is real from the first second: pages, layout, typography.

Litho generating a document from a written description

02Agents apply your design system

Specialised page, brand and project agents keep every document on-brand. Design systems are inherited across a workspace, so a change to the brand propagates to everything built on it.

Litho brand agent applying a design system to a document

03Edit live, export anywhere

Documents are edited visually with the agents in the loop, with snapshots and revert for safety. Export to PDF, PNG or JPG when it's ready to ship.

Litho exporting a finished document to PDF

// 03. Architecture

The app is Electron, React and TypeScript with local-first workspaces backed by SQLite - documents, brands and project state live on the user's machine, not a server. Specialised agents own different concerns: page agents generate and edit layouts, brand agents manage design systems, project agents keep multi-document work coherent. Design-system inheritance, snapshots and revert make agent edits safe to accept and easy to undo.

ElectronReactTypeScriptSQLiteLocal-firstPage / brand / project agentsDesign-system inheritanceSnapshots & revertPDF / PNG / JPG export

// 04. Shipping it

A desktop product needs more than an app: Litho ships with a public Next.js site and AWS infrastructure managed with Terraform - Lambda and API Gateway for the release, signup and authentication APIs, DynamoDB for state, S3 signed downloads for distributing builds, Route 53 and ACM for DNS and TLS. The interesting part of the project is the intersection: agent systems, local-first UX, and real production distribution - one person owning all three.

Next.jsTerraformLambdaAPI GatewayDynamoDBS3 signed downloadsRoute 53ACM