For years my RSS setup was a compromise. I never wanted to pay for a desktop reader, so I stayed on The Old Reader: a perfectly fine service, but it felt like visiting a website, because that's what it was. What I actually wanted was simple: a native Mac app, feeds stored locally, no account, no subscription, and fast enough to triage a hundred articles from the keyboard.

So I stopped wishing and built it. LumenAI is a local-first RSS reader for macOS with AI summaries, taken from an empty folder to a notarizable DMG in about an hour of wall-clock time, with me as product owner and build verifier while the AI wrote the code.

Ask me questions first

My pitch to the AI was one paragraph: a local RSS reader for Mac, a premium feel, and treat it like a real engineering project, with clear phases, and ask me questions before making decisions .…