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Positioning

Who kiln is for, what it refuses to be, and the lens we use to pick features.

The call: built for directors, not typists​

The vibecoder-vs-professional question (#28) is a false choice. The real split is between people who type code and people who direct and read it, and the second group is growing on both ends: newcomers who never learned git, and senior engineers who now spend their day reviewing agent output. kiln is for directors.

That resolves the tension cleanly:

  • No knowledge is required that the app could carry for you. Version control speaks plain language at the surface ("checkpoint", "share", "rewind"), with the real git vocabulary one hover away — teach, don't hide. Terminals exist but are spun up for you (#26). A vibecoder is never stranded.
  • Nothing is dumbed down. The full file tree, real zsh, real diffs, and real model output are always reachable. A professional never feels the guardrails.

The squad is the clearest expression of this: you don't ask kiln to help you type — you watch named agents read, propose, and explain, and you decide what lands.

The USP, in one sentence​

A native macOS editor where on-device intelligence is ambient and plural — a squad of visible agents working your project alongside you — rather than a chat box bolted to a buffer.

Three properties make this defensible rather than a feature checklist:

  1. On-device first. Apple Foundation Models make inference free and private, so kiln can afford to think about your project constantly, unprompted. Cloud-metered tools can't copy the cadence, only the features.
  2. Plural and visible. Agents have names, presence, and personas. The multiplayer feel — dots in the sidebar, a roster, a feed — makes AI work reviewable and social instead of modal and hidden.
  3. Reading first. The calm surface (reading mode, breathing sections, margin notes) is the human's half of the deal: kiln optimizes the reviewing experience because reviewing is the job now.

The feature test for anything new: does it only work because inference is free, local, and always on? If a cloud-metered VS Code extension could do it identically, it's table stakes at best — schedule it accordingly.

A second lesson from the research (#22): the features people love most in IDEs — local history, scratch files, structural search — are the ones they discover years late, because they have no visual surface and get found socially, not through the product. kiln's answer is the squad: proactive agents are a discoverability mechanism, surfacing the right capability at the moment of need instead of hiding it behind a command palette.

What kiln refuses to be​

  • Not an extension platform. The squad subsumes the long tail; the short list of genuinely table-stakes jobs gets built natively.
  • Not cross-platform. macOS 26+, Apple Silicon, and every native affordance we can reach (below).
  • Not a chat-first product. Potter (the chat) is a side panel; the project task graph and the squad are the primary AI surfaces.

Mac-native affordances worth building on (#17)​

Ranked by how directly each amplifies the USP:

  1. App Intents + Shortcuts — "Hey Siri, set the squad on the project." Squad runs and pair invites as system-level intents; kiln becomes automatable from outside itself.
  2. UserNotifications — squad activity surfaces as native notifications with action buttons (approve a proposal from the banner) when the panel is closed or the app is backgrounded. The presence layer beyond the window (#19).
  3. Touch ID / LocalAuthentication — biometric approval for agent actions that touch disk or run commands. Trust theater that is also real trust.
  4. MenuBarExtra — a glanceable squad status in the menu bar: who's working, what landed while you were away.
  5. Core Spotlight — index project symbols/todos so system search finds "where do we parse proposals" inside your project.
  6. Foundation Models (already shipped) — the free-inference substrate everything above leans on.
  7. Quick Look, Services, drag-from-Finder — politeness features; do them when touched, don't schedule them.

Research appendices​

Extension and community-thread analyses live on the issues they answer: VS Code (#23), Sublime (#24), discovered-features thread (#22). The conclusions that survived into strategy are folded into this doc.