Solipsist Native macOS harness for Boris
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Mission

Solipsist is Radio UserLand’s job in Mail’s body: a native Mac harness that turns the graph-native publication compiler into a one-window workstation for sources (in Settings), mailboxes, a reading place, inspection, preview, and broadcast — and refuses to invent anything the HIG or a Boris contract already named.

The engine we harness

Boris is not a Markdown-to-HTML converter. It is a compiler: Markdown (or Textile, or Cooklang) in → a validated Trunk/Satellite content graph → deterministic contracted projections (HTML, JSON IR, RAG packs, context bundles, llms.txt, RSS, sitemap, and live publication targets). Solipsist harnesses the afterparty integration line — boris/0.8.1 — and never touches the compiler itself.

Why a Mac app at all

Boris ships its own browser-based editor. Solipsist is the complementary native desktop citizen:

  • Native file access — sandboxed, security-scoped bookmarks; real Mac open/save semantics across every project folder.
  • Mac integration — windows, menus, keyboard, notifications, pasteboard, drag-and-drop.
  • A bundled, offline engine — the boris binary ships inside the app (arm64, zero runtime deps); no server, no browser tab, no toolchain at runtime.
  • A publishing console — GitHub Pages / Standard.site / Nostr workflows surfaced as native flows, not terminal commands.
  • No second stack — the app never reimplements compiler semantics; it renders Boris’s JSON contracts (manifest, graph, completion, build-report, analysis reports) and drives watch --serve for preview.

The non-negotiables

  1. Never touch the boris repo. No commits, no edits, no pushes.
  2. Never reimplement Boris semantics in Swift. The JSON contracts are the single source of truth; Swift only mirrors and renders them.
  3. Never silently ignore diagnostics or exit codes. Surface them.
  4. The subprocess boundary is a feature. Crash isolation, cancellation, never in-process Zig.
  5. Never mutate the user’s content tree except as the direct result of an explicit save.

Where we are

M0–M8 gates and the depth batch (first-run, filter, profile 1:1, publish family) are in. Next ship is a clean-Mac DMG; next product cut is the Mail body (Settings, mailboxes, reading pane) — see Roadmap.