Kuku is back as an open-source, local-first second brain for the AI era. It keeps your knowledge in plain Markdown files, then turns your vault into reusable context: wikilinks, backlinks, graph, search, and AI-assisted edits with reviewable diffs. Unlike closed note apps or one-off AI chats, Kuku is built to make your memory portable across tools, models, and self-hosted setups.
Hey Product Hunt 👋 I’m Minkyu Lee, design engineer on Kuku.
Our first launch started as an Obsidian-like Markdown editor. Thanks to this community, we got a ton of attention, feedback, and energy from it.
Since then, we’ve been rebuilding Kuku almost from the ground up, many late nights included.
Kuku is now open source and moving toward something bigger: a local-first second brain that can become shared memory for your AI tools.
Think plain Markdown, wikilinks, graph, search, Cursor-style AI edits, and a Mem0-like memory layer — but open, hackable, and yours.
We’re still early, still shipping hard, and looking for people who want to help shape it: users, contributors, plugin builders, and anyone obsessed with AI context.
Would love your feedback, questions, and weirdest use cases.
The Tauri-not-Electron call is the part I appreciate most. The Obsidian comparison gets a lot of attention but the bigger story for me is the binary size and idle memory profile when you actually run a markdown editor on a laptop alongside a dozen other apps. Going to try this on my secondary work machine first.
Local-first + plain markdown is the only second-brain shape that survives long-term — closed note apps eventually break trust on either lock-in or pricing, and the migration cost on a 5-year vault is brutal. The portable-memory framing is what most AI-note tools miss; they treat notes as in-app data instead of files you own. I run a podcast (https://open.spotify.com/show/0m1oR8AyQv17DVpc5MmirG) on financial modelling and the listener-feedback I get most is exactly this: "where do I keep the takeaways?" — audio doesn't fold into a closed notes app cleanly, but plain markdown with backlinks does. Curious how Kuku handles AI-edits on existing files: do diffs apply per-paragraph or per-file, and is there a way to reject just one chunk of a multi-edit suggestion?
Local-first is the right call for a second brain cloud sync always feels like a liability for personal notes. Does it handle multiple AI models or is it locked to one?
congrats on the relaunch. the tauri + local-first call is the right one, electron-based note apps always feel like they're fighting the OS. the cursor-style diffs for AI edits is the part that sells it for me, "AI suggests, u review" is way better than the yolo-edit pattern most tools ship with.
curious where ur memory layer goes from here, is the plan to expose it as a context source other AI tools can read from, or keep it inside kuku?
Finally someone said "fuck Electron" for a markdown editor. Tauri + local-first + AI that actually writes to files instead of just yapping. Pure signal. Congrats on the launch! ⚡️
The Cursor-style edit preview is a strong trust signal—what kinds of edits does it handle well today (refactors, link hygiene, summaries), and where does it still struggle compared to manual editing?
Hi everyone, I’m one of the developers behind Kuku, mainly working on the core logic and implementation.
We’ve rebuilt a lot of the product from the ground up for this launch, while thinking deeply about how local-first Markdown knowledge management can connect with an AI memory layer.
Kuku is still early, and there’s a lot we want to improve.
Please feel free to share anything. I’d be happy to answer as openly as I can.
We’ll also be shipping frequent updates from here, so please keep an eye on what’s coming next.
How do you handle sync between devices if it’s local first, like is there a recommended setup with Git?
Kuku is open source, but we’re building it like a real company: a local-first second brain and memory layer for the AI era.
About Kuku: open source on Product Hunt
“Your open-source, local second brain for every AI”
Kuku: open source launched on Product Hunt on May 8th, 2026 and earned 221 upvotes and 23 comments, placing #7 on the daily leaderboard. Kuku is back as an open-source, local-first second brain for the AI era. It keeps your knowledge in plain Markdown files, then turns your vault into reusable context: wikilinks, backlinks, graph, search, and AI-assisted edits with reviewable diffs. Unlike closed note apps or one-off AI chats, Kuku is built to make your memory portable across tools, models, and self-hosted setups.
Kuku: open source was featured in Text Editors (16.8k followers), SaaS (42k followers), Artificial Intelligence (468.5k followers), GitHub (41.2k followers) and YC Application (46 followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 158.7k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Kuku: open source?
Kuku: open source was hunted by Minkyu Lee. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how Kuku: open source stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Minkyu Lee