A personal AI operating system for people who build with AI.
AI tools forget. Every new session starts from zero, and the decisions behind your work disappear into old chats. Maro Portal is a workspace where the work you hand to AI, your conversations, and your decisions keep living and build up into an asset you can come back to. It was built by a math teacher with no programming background, with Claude as the main tool.
Why we're building this
More and more people build software with AI without being professional developers. They run into the same walls we did.
Context gets lost
Each AI session starts fresh. Plans, constraints, and earlier decisions have to be explained again, or they quietly get dropped.
Work is scattered
Results live across many chats, tools, and folders. It is hard to see what was done, why, and what comes next.
Hard to check AI's work
Without a developer's background, it is difficult to review what several AI tools produced and to keep them working in one direction.
Maro Portal
A local-first workbench for your Mac. You talk to Maro in one place and hand off work. Results get reviewed, and every conversation, decision, and lesson is kept as a record you can search, revisit, and build on.
Central conversation
One place to talk to Maro and hand off work, instead of starting a new chat for every task.
Personal wiki
Daily briefings are filed as pages on their own. Decisions and research sit beside them, each page with its sources, revisions, and open questions.
Knowledge map
Records grouped into topics and connections, with seven ways to look at them, so you can see what you know and how it fits together.
Work routes and chronicle
Every work stream shown as a route of steps, plus a chronicle that replays past work as a story with what was learned.
Library
One home for source material: a wiki shelf, a second brain of decisions and lessons, a knowledge map, and a viewer for books, PDFs, photos, and video.
Work encyclopedia
More than 200 documents of rules, concepts, and lessons learned, sorted by category, so past mistakes become the next task's checklist.
Inside Maro Portal
How it works
Maro Portal treats every task as a piece of work with a beginning, a review, and an end. Nothing counts as done until it has been checked.
Six steps per task
Each task is born, checked, run, evaluated, harvested, and closed. You can see which step it is on at any time.
Reviewed before it counts
Work is checked by a separate reviewer before it closes. Review receipts name the provider that did the review, and a partial pass is never rounded up to a full one.
Model-neutral by design
Providers are replaceable parts. Today Maro Portal connects to Anthropic Claude, OpenAI Codex, and an on-device model, and a task keeps its history when the model changes.
Local-first
A native macOS app with a local Node.js server. Your records stay in the app's data folder on your own Mac. AI calls go out only to the providers you connect.
Decisions on the record
Founder decisions are logged with their original wording and where they were said, so later work can check what was actually decided.
Lessons come back
What went wrong is written down as a lesson and filed in the encyclopedia, so the same mistake is harder to repeat.
In real use
Three things our founder actually does with it.
A briefing every morning
In August the founder asked for "what got done and what is stuck, in plain words." Maro Portal now prepares a morning briefing overnight and files a daily AI news page in the wiki. Pages for October 3 through 8, 2026 are there.
Writing a novel
What began in May as a question about starting a martial-arts novel became Maro Portal's writing extension, then its own app. Maro Writer was installed as a separate macOS app in late September 2026 and holds the manuscript today.
Building Maro Portal with itself
Maro Portal's own development runs through the same loop. As of October 8, 2026, 424 pieces of work had been opened, built, reviewed, and closed.
Maro Writer
A standalone writing app spun out of Maro Portal's writing extension, built for long-form and serialized fiction. The writer stays in charge: AI drafts only become part of the manuscript when the writer adopts them.
Story memory
Chapter-by-chapter memory of what happened, so the AI answers from the story's own record instead of guessing.
Three co-writing modes
AI-led, writer-led, or writing together, switchable per work.
Genre tools
A built-in glossary of several hundred martial-arts terms, a name finder, genre-specific themes, and a shelf for multiple works.
Built with Claude
Claude is our main tool. Over 70% of our important work runs on Claude: direction, design, planning, and the key reviews. Other AI workers take the rest, mainly implementation and second reviews. A math teacher with no programming background built two macOS apps this way.
What Claude actually does for us
The control room
The founder gives direction in a Claude session. Every decision is logged with its original wording and a pointer back to the session where it was made.
Design and direction
Claude lanes plan the work, split it into tasks, and hand implementation to other workers. On October 5, 2026 the founder made it official: "the main lane is Claude."
Review before anything counts
Finished work is checked by a separate reviewer before it closes. Claude is the reviewer on the work that matters most, and its receipts are kept.
Building Maro Writer
Maro Writer was specified in a Claude Code session on September 27, 2026, passed all 309 regression checks that day, and was installed as its own macOS app two days later.
Inside the products
Maro Portal's server has Claude connected as a provider. Maro Writer has a Claude connection for co-writing.
Running the company
Company research, such as our product fact sheet and name and trademark checks, is compiled in a Claude lane, with a source attached to every line.
How Claude became our main tool
- May 2026A management app for the founder's own math class is planned in conversations with Claude.
- August 2026Claude Code joins the Maro Portal 2 rebuild, built from the ground up.
- September 2026Maro Writer is specified in a Claude Code session and installed as its own app.
- October 2026Claude becomes the lead lane for direction, design, and review.
Why Claude leads
We give Claude the work that needs judgment: design, direction, and review. It holds long project context and follows our written rules closely. For a founder who is not a developer, that is what makes it possible to keep many AI workers moving in one direction.
Maro Portal is model-neutral by design, so other models also implement and give second reviews. That is why Claude holds 8 of our 17 work panes yet carries over 70% of the important work: Claude is the one that leads.
Built on the record
Every piece of work on Maro Portal leaves a trace. As of October 2026:
Counted from the project's own records on October 8, 2026. The decision log covers September 26 to October 8, 2026.
Where we are
Both products are installed and running as macOS apps, and our founder uses them for real work.
| Area | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Maro Portal macOS app and local server | Running | Installed. Server reported healthy on October 8, 2026 |
| Personal wiki, knowledge map, work records | Running | Used to manage our own work |
| Maro Writer macOS app | Running | Used for the founder's martial-arts novel |
How we build
A few rules we hold ourselves to.
Evidence first
Look at the real thing, then reason, then conclude. A claim of "done" is checked again, not taken on trust.
Done means usable
If a feature works but is hard to use every day, it is not finished. Done is usable, correct, safe, and verifiable together.
Use what exists
Before building something new, find what is already there. Wiring comes before new parts.
Calm above, busy below
The first screen stays quiet. The complicated work happens under the surface, and you go to it only when you need to decide something.
Rules guide, bans are explicit
Rules give direction rather than lock things down. What must never happen is written out plainly.
Failures are assets
A failure is recorded, not hidden: what was expected, what happened, and the smallest check that would have caught it.
About Maro Labs
Maro Labs is a one-person company based in South Korea. Our founder, Maro, is a math teacher, not a professional programmer, who started building software with AI in April 2026 and kept running into the same problem: the tools lost context along the way.
Maro Portal began as the workspace our founder needed. We believe the people now building with AI, without a developer's background, need the same thing.
- April 2026Maro Labs founded; first software built with AI
- May 2026A management app for the founder's own small math class
- July 2026Maro Portal, first version
- August 2026Maro Portal 2 rebuilt from the ground up
- September 2026Maro Writer split out as its own macOS app
- October 2026Company website and email at marolabs.kr
Get in touch
Interested in Maro Portal or Maro Writer, or building with AI yourself?
founder@marolabs.kr