manifesto
the story
Hermes was the Greek god of both commerce and communication. With his winged sandals he traveled swiftly between the worlds of mortals and gods, transmitting ideas and guiding souls. In some tellings, Hermes is credited with inventing writing and language itself.
The Romans dubbed him Mercury, related indeed to words such as commerce, merchandise and mercenary. Mercury is also a metal notoriously liquid in room temperature: unlike water which is transparent, mercury is fully reflective. For this reflective virtue among many others, mercury was held in high symbolic regard by alchemists.
As a writing tool dedicated for curating platform-agnostic distillations of ideas, Alembic is the author's personal offering to Hermes.
in practice
wings for your ideas: write once, publish anywhere
The most durable format is the one that predates and will outlast every platform. If text is the universal interface, what better container for it than the platform-agnostic text image? Alembic doesn't need you to invite your friends on it for network effects to exist; it is built to leverage the network effects of every existing platform online. The same png exported here renders identically whether on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Instagram, Facebook, Substack Notes, Threads, your blog or email newsletter, someone's gallery app, Pinterest, cosmos.so, are.na...
Every existing platform dedicated for ideas either requires you to post them on their walled garden ecosystem, or to write it in one place and decorate in another. Not Alembic. Once you export your image, it's yours forever to do with exactly as you please.
gamifying the editorial quest for brevity
Killing your darlings is one of the hardest things writers have to do. In Alembic, brevity is encouraged via an indirect mechanism: because the text autoresizes in the preview canvas, every word you write renders the text smaller. This provides a direct visual feedback loop for what it feels like to lose the communicative potency of your message through needless verbosity: you feel the impact of your words dilute in real-time; and every darling you kill, every filler word that doesn't serve the essence of your idea, feels satisfying to remove because the remaining words get more space to convey their dense meaning. This is the art of distilling your ideas.
unified creation space
The friction between 'writing the thing' and 'making it presentable' kills most ideas before they reach anyone. Alembic collapses that gap. Your composition is the decoration. One workspace, one export, zero context-switching between tools built by people who've never spoken to each other.
controlled randomness in the shader lab
Alembic's design tools—the main text editor and the shader lab—make it trivially easy to curate aesthetically pleasing outputs without needing to be well-versed in complex design tools or theory. The shader lab lets you layer together over 80 image-processing shaders, or use the 40 purely procedural shaders as textures for your creations.
vibes-based search for the right shader
80+ shaders is a lot. This presented a fascinating technical problem: how can one find the right shaders without waddling through a long list of elaborate names every time? The solution is semantic search. Just by writing any word or sentence in the search field at the lab's right sidepanel, you can discover surprising connections from the latent space. For example, by searching "biology" the program suggests the Cell Division shader as well as the Reaction Diffusion shaders - despite both of these belonging to different hardcoded categories!
The explore-page in the lab contains an interactive 3D visualization of the shaders' embedding space: it lets you spatially explore the geometry of meaning in Alembic's shader library.
micro-essay as the internet-native idea medium
Longer than an aphorism, shorter than a longform essay to prevent rambling and verbosity, the micro-essay is a perfect internet-native medium for thought. Dense enough to say something real, short enough to finish quickly, visually bounded so it feels complete, and portable because it's just a png. Works as both teaser and destination. Compression as craft instead of compromise.
advances in OCR -> the legitimacy of text in images
Computer vision has advanced enough that every modern smartphone or computer has a gallery app able to read and search text in images. It is only a matter of time until this becomes a standard feature on every social media platform, and text in images will be treated with the same legitimacy as any online markup text.
Thank you for reading this manifesto. Please enjoy using Alembic; I have enjoyed every single moment of making it.
February 2026