Building Genos: Prompt Studio for macOS
I'm always stunned when I need to generate an image for my work with AI. Placing my cursor inside the text input, looking at it blinking but my mind still hasn't made up what to prompt. "What was it again?" is my thought most of the time.
That was the problem. Not just the blank input, the nowhere to save what worked.
I had no real system.
Every time I finished a generation session, I'd use the images for my project, sometimes paste the prompt into an Apple Note I'd never remember to open again, and tell myself I'd sort it later. The good outputs got buried. The prompts got lost. The references I wanted to reuse were buried deep with other notes and half-forgotten.
I knew roughly what I wanted. A place where an image and its prompt could just live together.
Genos started from that.
It's a local workspace for AI image prompts. Drag images in. Write the prompt alongside them. Assign to a project, tag with a model. No account to make. No sync. No subscription. Just your work, in one place.
The idea was simple. The simplest ideas always feel easy until you start.
I'm not a native macOS developer by background. I've spent most of my time in web work — JavaScript, React, the usual. SwiftUI was new territory.
The first few weeks were humbling in the specific way that new tools are. I'd write something that looked right and have Xcode shout warnings at me. Publishing changes from within view updates is not allowed. I fixed one warning and found three more. The kind of loop that makes you question the whole premise.
One of the stranger ones: every keypress in the project name field created a new project. Type "cat" and you'd have three projects — "c," "ca," "cat." Obvious in hindsight. I was triggering the create function on every change instead of waiting for the enter key. One small fix. But that's what the early build looked like. Small things, discovered one at a time, fixed and moved on.
The todo list grew every day and shrank every night. That rhythm became the process.
The local-first decision wasn't a statement.
I wasn't trying to make a point about cloud software or data privacy. I just didn't want to build an account system, and I didn't want my own workflow tool to need a subscription to keep running. The library lives on your Mac. You can export it, import it, back it up. If I stop updating the app tomorrow, it still works.
That felt right. Not as a philosophy. Just as a preference.
There are still a few things on the list. There always are. But it does the thing I needed it to do — keeps images and prompts together, organized by project, searchable, copyable in one shortcut.
I use it every day. That's the test I care about most.
If you work with AI image tools and any of this sounds familiar, it might be worth a look.