We rebuilt tidi from scratch
tidi started as a visual bookmarking idea, drifted into agent infrastructure, and stopped feeling like anything we wanted to use. So in May we threw the whole direction away and rebuilt it from scratch.
The first version chased a big abstract idea. Agent memory, company knowledge, infrastructure for other people’s workflows. On paper it was a market. In practice we never opened it. That’s the tell. When you stop using your own product, the product is wrong, not you.
The rebuild went the other way: make the thing we actually missed. A visual canvas for what you see, think, and want to remember. A shoebox with a surface.
What tidi is now
Projects are canvases. You drop stickies, notes, todo cards, links, and images anywhere, and an invisible grid snaps them into place on release. It stays loose without ever getting messy. That balance is the whole product: the freedom of a desk covered in paper, with none of the entropy.
Everything starts in the Inbox, the default dumping ground. Paste a screenshot, a quote, a link from your phone, a half-formed thought. Sort it later, or never. Links unfurl into rich cards. Images land ready to arrange. Todo cards hold the small lists that don’t deserve an app of their own.
And it doesn’t look like a SaaS tool, on purpose. Warm paper tones, soft cards, hand-placed details, a palette tuned card by card. Most tools in this category feel like spreadsheets wearing a costume. tidi is built to feel like a desk, not a dashboard.
No chat window, by design
Here’s the opinionated part: there is no AI chat inside tidi, and there never will be.
We think bolting a chat panel into every app is the skeuomorphism of this decade. The AI you already use, Claude, Cursor, whatever comes next, is better than anything we’d embed. So instead of putting an assistant inside the product, we made the product reachable from outside.
tidi ships with a native MCP server and a REST API from day one. We wrote recently that agents are users now. tidi is that idea shipped.
Claude reads and writes our canvases as naturally as we do. Mid-conversation, an agent can file a link to the Inbox, pull up a project’s cards, create a note, or log what it did and when. Every project and card is addressable, so “add this to my design inspiration board” is a one-line instruction, not a workflow. The canvas becomes shared space between you and your AI, and the AI stays where it already lives.
Built me-first
We’ve been running tidi as our own capture layer for weeks. Quotes, homelab notes, design inspiration, recipes, things our agents file during work sessions. It’s the first place things land now, and the first product decision every week is whatever annoyed us the day before.
That’s the standard we’re holding it to: no feature ships because a market report says so. It ships because we reached for it and it wasn’t there.
What’s next
tidi is live at tidi.so and we’re polishing it for a public launch. There’s a waitlist on the homepage. If a calm, spatial home for your thinking sounds right, put your email in and you’ll be first through the door.