Ink v1.1.5: Meet Cogito, Your Local-First Writing Companion
Weekly development digest — week of 28 March to 3 April 2026
Writing tools have a habit of getting in your way. They autocomplete your sentences, rewrite your paragraphs, and optimise your prose into something that sounds like everyone else. ink — a local-first markdown editor and exporter — has been quietly moving in a different direction, and this week’s release makes that clearest yet.
v1.1.5 introduces Cogito Mode, and it’s worth understanding what makes it different from every other “AI writing assistant” you’ve seen.
What Is Cogito Mode?
Cogito doesn’t write for you. It asks you questions.
Accessible from a new button in the top-right corner of the editor, Cogito opens a side panel that reads your last sentence and generates exactly three follow-up questions — prompts designed to sharpen your thinking, surface assumptions, or push your argument further. You can insert those questions directly into your document as structured block content, essentially scaffolding your own reflection inside the draft itself.
There are two inference modes: Lite, for speed, and Deep, for heavier reasoning. Both run locally. No data leaves your machine.
The philosophy here is deliberate. Cogito isn’t trying to complete your thoughts — it’s trying to expand and refine them.
What Changed Since v1.1.4
The jump from v1.1.4 (released just two days earlier, on 31 March) to v1.1.5 is surprisingly large for such a short window.
v1.1.4 focused on polish and tooling hygiene: replacing all emoji icons across the application with modern SVG icons from Lucide Icons, wiring ESLint into pre-commit hooks, and improving the Makefile with a help command. These aren’t flashy changes, but they signal a codebase being prepared for something bigger.
v1.1.5 is that something bigger.
| v1.1.4 | v1.1.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| AI features | None | Cogito side panel, Lite/Deep models |
| Testing | Pre-existing suite | QUnit + Cypress E2E for Cogito |
| Release pipeline | release-please automation | Build validation + ink-app.html gating |
| UI | SVG icons replacing emojis | Cogito button top-right |
Why This Release Matters
Until now, ink was a very good local markdown editor with solid export capabilities. v1.1.5 marks the beginning of a different identity: a thoughtful writing environment that uses AI not to produce output, but to generate productive friction.
In an era where most AI writing tools are racing toward full automation, Cogito Mode is an interesting counter-argument. It keeps you in the seat. It treats your ideas as worth developing, not replacing.
If that sounds like the kind of tool you’ve been waiting for, the release is available on GitHub — a single self-contained ink-app.html file you can run in any browser, with no installation required.
You can also give it a try here
Follow the project at github.com/feddernico/ink. Built by @feddernico.