About Fledgling
Tools for people building from nothing.
Fledgling makes AI-native software for founders and developers: a suite of editors that treat plain text as the source of truth, plus a small shelf of books about building with machines. Everything here is engine-first, diffable, and built to be co-authored by humans and models alike.
Plain text, always
Documents are Markdown. Workbooks are GridMD. Decks are an element tree you can read. If a format can’t be diffed, merged and streamed, we don’t ship it.
Engines, not wrappers
Every product is built from scratch; parsers, formula engines, renderers. No black-box dependencies on the keystroke path, and native Swift where performance demands it.
AI with agency
Models draft, stream and generate, but every change is yours to keep or undo. The human is always the editor of record.
The suite
A from-scratch GFM & MDX editor with unified live preview and a streaming AI renderer.
An XLSX-grade grid, formula engine and chart renderer, in the browser and native.
AI-native decks that generate on-brand and stream onto a canvas that’s a real editor.
Markdown for spreadsheets: full XLSX fidelity in diffable, LLM-authorable plain text.
The field guide
So I wrote the book I couldn’t buy.
A field guide · Edition 01 · 2026
“Make It Look Nice” Is Not a Prompt.
An ADHD-optimised field guide to the vocabulary of modern design, motion, 3D and UX/UI.
The gap between what you picture and what an AI gives you back is almost never the model; it’s the words. “Nice”, “clean” and “modern” aren’t instructions, they’re a request for the average of the internet. This is the vocabulary design tools actually obey, from hierarchy and type scales to spring physics and PBR materials, and every term ships as a copy-paste prompt phrase.
It’s written ADHD-first, because that’s the brain I’ve got: chapters run three to seven minutes, open with the one thing worth remembering, and end with something to try in the next ten minutes.
The whole book in one lineStop typing nice, clean, modern.
Who’s behind it
Luke Rhodes
I’m a founder and engineer building Fledgling. I’ve spent years shipping developer tools and got tired of watching great ideas get trapped in proprietary formats and sluggish editors. Fledgling is my attempt at the opposite: fast, from-scratch software where your work stays in plain text you own, and AI is a collaborator you can always overrule.
I’m also co-founder of Diolog with Amy Benson, where we’re building investor-relations software for listed companies and the retail investors who follow them.
When I’m not writing parsers, I’m writing about them; the field guides above come from the same workbench as the apps.
Get in touch
Say hello to Fledgling.
Partnerships, press, early access, or just a good argument about file formats; it all reaches me.