My co-founder (Vagmi) and I (Shanthi) collaborate by writing things down. Ideas, plans, strategies. They all start as words on a page. That sounds simple enough, but the way we each prefer to write could not be more different. I use Google Docs. It’s familiar, structured, and I rely on ChatGPT (and sometimes Gemini) to refine my thoughts.

My co-founder? He swears by NeoVim. He uses a plugin customized on top of Avante NVIM to work with AI models like Claude and Gemini directly inside NeoVim. And that’s where the chaos began.

Since he works in plain text (Markdown) while I live in Google Docs, syncing our ideas has turned into a never-ending manual process. I had to pull his local changes from GitHub, copy them into Docs, edit them, and then push them back. Every. Single. Time. What should have been an effortless collaboration became a workflow nightmare.

We tried to meet in the middle. Maybe Notion? But Notion didn’t allow us to switch between different AI models or customize prompts the way NeoVim did. Worse, it was either Notion AI’s way or the highway. Every existing tool was either too rigid, too manual, or too limiting. And that’s when frustration really set in.

🚨 Version Control Hell – His Markdown-based notes sync via GitHub, so I had to constantly pull, copy, edit, and push back.

🚨 AI Model Lock-In – Google Docs forces me to use Gemini, while his setup lets him switch models on the fly.

🚨 No True Inline AI Assistance – Notion seemed like a potential compromise, but it lacked the ability to iterate content in real time the way NeoVim allowed.

We tried everything—Notion, Obsidian, even hacking together scripts—but nothing worked the way we wanted. Every tool forced us into someone else’s workflow, instead of adapting to ours.

So after months of frustration, we decided to build our own solution—something that finally let us write our way, with AI that actually fits into our workflow.

🚀 And it changed everything. More on that in the next post.