Introducing Slab: quiet tools with your AI in the loop

What we kept refusing

Every writing tool we tried wanted to be a workspace. Every reading app wanted to be a platform. And lately, every one of them wants to sell us an AI — their model, their subscription, their chat window bolted to the side of our work. The tools got louder while the work stayed the same: read carefully, mark honestly, write clearly.

So Slab is built around three refusals: no proprietary formats, no second AI subscription, and no interface that competes with the document for your attention.

The tools

Slab Pad is a Markdown editor for the Mac. Plain .md files in folders you chose, a live preview that stays in step, PDFs and CSVs alongside your notes, and passages you can encrypt in place when a document carries something confidential. It costs £9.99 once — perpetual licence, three Macs, ten-day free trial.

Slab Reader is a reading app for the iPad — PDFs and Markdown, with the Apple Pencil as a real highlighter. Sweep to mark, note your doubts, filter by colour across the whole library, and read the lot offline. It's coming to the App Store from £1.99 a month.

A third tool — Slab CMD, a terminal companion — is in development.

The connecting idea

What makes the family one product rather than two is the AI architecture. Slab ships no chatbot. Instead, both tools speak MCP — the open standard assistants use to connect to the world — so the assistant you already pay for becomes part of your workflow:

• In Pad, it reads your selection, answers questions in margin threads, and edits the section you're looking at — through a local server that never leaves your Mac.
• In Reader, it reads your pencil highlights and replies under them, sends documents to your library, and picks up your notes from any chat you have with it.
• In both, your chats stay in your AI — one assistant, one memory, one history — and the answers stay in your documents, where the work is.

We've written up why we think bring-your-own-AI is the right architecture — the short version is: one subscription, no scattered chat histories, and a privacy model where your content never enters anyone else's AI pipeline.

Where it's going

Slab Pad is shipping today and updates itself — the changelog is public. Slab Reader is in the final stretch before the App Store. The two share an account, and over time they'll share more: one library, one set of AI connections, one quiet place for the reading and writing that matters.

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