I'm Kazim Merchant — founder of NavigatorLabs, the lab where local-first, private-by-default software gets built, shipped, and documented. Find the lab at navigators.com too.
I build tools that coding agents can run on a machine you control, then I send the hard fixes back upstream. Python, TypeScript, MCP. Everything open source, everything building in public — and everything audited: SLSA provenance on releases, SHA-pinned CI, an OpenSSF Scorecard of 7.0, and proof artifacts that regenerate byte-identically in CI rather than screenshots nobody can reproduce.
The flagship — reimagine-it: Content-Derived Design. It reads an HTML page and redesigns it from its own nouns, dates, numbers, and colors — never invented — across 17 design directions with 96.8% measured pairwise distinctness. 88★, 1,700+ npm downloads a week, 23 releases in under three months, and 23 merged PRs shipped through a protected main with 16+ required checks on every one.
/reimagine-it · pdf-studio · tools · book-guide-mcp · research · sponsor
| Project | What it is | Proof |
|---|---|---|
| reimagine-it | Content-Derived Design CLI + Agent Skill (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Gemini CLI). Paste HTML; get a standalone redesign whose palette, motif, and motion derive from the source's own facts — never invented. 17 directions, Auto direction-picking, a 19-rule deterministic audit, an MCP server, a Design Health GitHub Action, and a live playground. Not a mood board. | ⭐ 88 · v2.13.1 · 1.7k dl/week · live playground |
| NavigatorsLab PDF Studio | A genuinely free, private, full-featured PDF editor that runs 100% in your browser. Edits the text already inside the PDF (not just stamps on top), fills & flattens AcroForms, OCRs scans locally, signs, redacts, reorders/merges/splits, diffs two revisions, and answers questions via an on-device LLM. | Try it live — no uploads, no accounts, no watermarks · MIT |
| NavigatorsLab Tools | Fifteen free, open-source utilities that run 100% in your browser: strip photo GPS, shrink images to an exact size, clean phone-scanned documents, sign PDFs, reorganize/merge pages, OCR receipts to CSV, generate QR codes privately, diff contracts word-level, trim audio, generate invoices, batch-rename by EXIF, print prep. Speaks agent too: an MCP endpoint (/tools/mcp), deep-link parameters on every tool, and llms.txt machine-readable docs. |
Try them live — no uploads, nothing retained, ever · MIT |
| book-guide-mcp | Playbooks and tutors (Socratic, Avicenna) your agents run locally across Cursor, Claude, VS Code, and Zed. Citations from books you own. No API keys for the core loop. | v0.2.0 |
| study-guide | Exam-guides platform — certification prep with topic units and quizzes. | Live product |
| design-health-action | The 18 deterministic design-quality checks from reimagine-it, standalone — drop it on any HTML repo as a CI gate. No LLM, no API key. | GitHub Action |
Fifteen free, open-source (MIT) utilities that run 100% in your browser — and now each has its own standalone repo. Every repo's README and GitHub Pages site funnel straight back to the hub at navigatorslab.com/tools, where all fifteen live (plus an MCP endpoint for agents).
| Tool | Standalone repo | Try it |
|---|---|---|
| 🛡️ Photo Privacy Kit | NavigatorsLab-Photo-Privacy-Kit | Open |
| 🔍 Metadata & Hidden-Data Checker | NavigatorsLab-Metadata-Checker | Open |
| 🗜️ Image Shrinker | NavigatorsLab-Image-Shrinker | Open |
| 📄 Scan & Screenshot Cleaner | NavigatorsLab-Scan-Cleaner | Open |
| ✍️ Local E-Sign Pad | NavigatorsLab-E-Sign-Pad | Open |
| 🧾 Receipts → One PDF | NavigatorsLab-Receipts-to-PDF | Open |
| 🔢 Receipt OCR → CSV | NavigatorsLab-Receipt-OCR | Open |
| 🔳 QR Studio | NavigatorsLab-QR-Studio | Open |
| 🎧 Audio Trimmer | NavigatorsLab-Audio-Trimmer | Open |
| 🧮 Invoice / Quote Generator | NavigatorsLab-Invoice-Generator | Open |
| 🗂️ Batch Rename & Sort | NavigatorsLab-Batch-Rename | Open |
| 🖨️ Print-Shop Prep | NavigatorsLab-Print-Shop-Prep | Open |
| 📑 PDF Pages | NavigatorsLab-PDF-Pages | Open |
| 🔬 Text Diff | NavigatorsLab-Text-Diff | Open |
| 📊 Text Stats | NavigatorsLab-Text-Stats | Open |
The hub is the product: navigatorslab.com/tools — zero uploads, zero accounts, nothing retained, and it speaks agent (MCP + deep links).
Also in the lab: skill-slice (copy one Read-verified SKILL.md folder), liecatchers (your agent said Done — ten sensors, one RECEIPT.json, prove it), agenthub (community Claude Code plugin marketplace), and research (dated public notes on local-first agents, MCP, and the failure modes that show up when tools actually have to run).
/reimagine-it — fourteen real sources, no shared silhouette. Every tile is a real, committed .html artifact that regenerates byte-identically in CI.
The tiles above are re-rendered every week from public GitHub and npm APIs by scripts/refresh-stats.py — every tile links its source; no third-party counters. Static highlights, verified at v2.13.1:
- 88★ on reimagine-it · 1,732 npm downloads last week · 23 releases · 23 merged PRs in reimagine-it (59 across all repos)
- OpenSSF Scorecard 7.0 — Token-Permissions 10, Security-Policy 10, SLSA provenance + cosign signatures on npm releases
- 96.8% mean pairwise distinctness across all 136 design-direction pairs · benchmark 100/100 on all 17 tokens × 4 sources
- 116 tests (68 unit + 20 MCP + 28 e2e) over a 155-file parity corpus; 17 committed artifacts reproduce byte-identically in CI
- A proof lane of six real public-domain government pages — NPS Yellowstone, NASA Artemis II, NWS/NOAA hurricane outlook, US Census P60-282, Federal Register FOIA, Smithsonian Apollo 11 — each Auto-routed at 84–100% source fidelity
Hard, reviewable work — not drive-by typo farms.
| Repository | Change | Status |
|---|---|---|
| simonw/llm | Set conversation_id correctly in llm logs --data-ids |
Merged — #1613 |
| VoltAgent/awesome-agent-skills | reimagine-it added to the curated skill list (×2, incl. the update) | Merged — #966, #988 |
| nullorder/agenthub | reimagine-it plugin added | Merged — #35 |
| simonw/llm | Accept JSON Schema type names in schema_dsl |
Open — #1612 |
| pypa/hatch | Build a wheel from the sdist when both targets are requested | Open — #2386 |
AI agents help me move faster. I own every upstream diff I open.
The lab: navigatorslab.com · GitHub is the right place: @Kayforkind