Mutiny is a free, open-source writing app for essays and ideas. It lives on your computer, keeps your words private, and comes with an AI that asks hard questions instead of writing for you.
The Mutiny Manifesto
Every change started as a sentence someone was afraid to write. Mutiny exists for that sentence.
Laws, revolutions, apologies and love letters were all written first. If the world is broken, the fix begins on a page. Yours counts.
Mutiny is for people who sign what they think. The voice that counts is the one that stands behind its words and risks being wrong in public.
No accounts, no cloud, nobody reading over your shoulder. Your texts are plain files on your computer. If Mutiny disappeared tomorrow, every word would still be there.
A good editor makes you think harder. Mutiny's assistant researches, doubts and questions your argument. It never writes your ideas for you, and it never changes a word without your yes.
Opinions are cheap; arguments cost work. Mutiny gives you the tools writers have always earned the hard way: an outline before the draft, sources you can cite, the strongest objection faced head on.
Mutiny is free and open source, and it always will be. Take it, read it, change it, share it. A tool for dissent can't have an owner.
A draft doesn't have to be good. It just has to exist. The mutiny starts with the first line.
See it in action
Five channels, recorded from the real app. Nothing staged, nothing sped up except the assistant thinking.
A clean page. Mark what you still need and keep going; the note waits on the side.
What you write
Pick what you are writing and Mutiny gives it a shape: an outline of guiding questions, a bar that counts what matters, and an assistant that knows what kind of text it is reading.
Peterson · Dialectic · Toulmin · They say / I say · Pyramid · Exploratory · Five paragraphs
Free · Morning pages
Opinion · How-to · List — with reading time, meta description and Markdown for your site
Personal letter · Digest
Long video · Short · Podcast — timed out loud
Talk · Toast — timed out loud
Paste a link, a DOI or an ISBN; cite as you write; the list builds itself.
Your draft as cards. Read the skeleton: the first line of every paragraph.
Feed it your own texts and the assistant learns how you write, not how an AI writes.
Cut without fear. Everything you cut waits in its own tab.
The assistant
Optional, and yours to choose. It researches the facts you flag, questions your argument and offers other wordings. It never writes your ideas for you, and it never changes a word without your yes.
Flag a fact and it goes looking: an answer, and sources with the exact quote that backs it.
Three to seven remarks, pinned where they belong. Different for an essay, a blog post or a speech.
In an exploratory essay or free writing it does not correct. It asks what you have not asked yourself.
Talk about your draft with the draft in view. Take a line back into the page if it earns it.
Runs on what you already have: Claude Code, Codex, the Anthropic API, or any OpenAI-compatible service, including a model on your own machine.
Privacy
No accounts, no cloud, no telemetry. Your texts are plain files on your computer, and the app itself cannot reach the internet.
What an AI provider keeps of your text depends on its own policy. With a local model, nothing leaves at all.
Themes
Six themes for the whole app. Try them here: this page changes with them.
On Omarchy, Mutiny follows your desktop theme, live.
Free. Open. Yours.
Mutiny is free and open source under the MIT license. Read every line, change what you want, share it with anyone. It is built on NEO, the writer’s app by Hugh Howey.
For the ones who won't stay quiet.
Mutiny 1.0.1 for Linux, macOS and Windows. Free, forever.
For your computer
Make the AppImage executable (chmod +x) and run it. On Omarchy, scripts/install-linux.sh adds it to the menu.
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Drag Mutiny to Applications. The first time, right-click it → Open → Open. If macOS says it is damaged, run xattr -cr /Applications/Mutiny.app once.
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SmartScreen says "Windows protected your PC": click More info → Run anyway.
6da12928f734d32a832d4e76c2a1058f974bbf768f0fbbf4162c3051936d81edc8ed282af7747cfd8f7d27ab3ce6f94fc63d55840a263be36e4ef181fcb98d31The builds are not signed with paid Apple or Microsoft certificates, so your system asks once before opening Mutiny: