A Google Reader clone for the agent era — an RSS/Atom feed reader that runs as an Electron desktop app or a hosted web service from one shared TypeScript codebase.
RSS was always pull-based updates from publishers. Agents are exactly the kind of prolific, structured publishers that drown a chat UI but fit a feed perfectly. This reader treats feeds as the universal subscription format — blogs today, agent digests tomorrow.
- Feed reading — RSS 2.0 / Atom subscriptions, background polling with conditional GET (etag/last-modified), adaptive refresh intervals, exponential backoff on failures
- Classic three-pane UI — folders/feeds · article list · article view, like the original
- Read state — mark read on click, mark-all-read, per-feed unread counts
- XSS-safe rendering — every article body sanitized server-side with DOMPurify
- Local-first — embedded SQLite, no account needed; the hosted mode shares the same codebase
- Loopback-only by default — binds 127.0.0.1; exposure is a deliberate opt-in
| Milestone | Status | Contents |
|---|---|---|
| M1 | ✅ done | parser, sanitizer, storage, poller, API, minimal UI, Electron shell |
| M2 | planned | folders, starring, keyboard nav (j/k/n/p/s/m), mark-read-on-scroll |
| M3 | planned | full-text search, per-feed full-text extraction (Readability) |
| M4 | planned | OPML import/export, hosted mode (auth, Postgres), deployment |
| M5 | planned | Google Reader API compat, offline web (service worker) |
Future direction: agents as publishers — an agent that can write an Atom file to a URL is already subscribable; a future milestone makes that first-class (watched directory / publish endpoint).
Requires Node 22+ and pnpm.
pnpm install
pnpm -r build
# web dev (API on :3737, vite on :5173)
READER_PORT=3737 pnpm dev:server
pnpm dev:web
# desktop (after one-time native rebuild, see apps/desktop/README.md)
pnpm --filter @reader/desktop dev
# tests
pnpm -r testapps/
web/ React + Vite SPA
desktop/ Electron shell (forks the server on 127.0.0.1, random port)
packages/
core/ feed parsing, HTML sanitization, shared types — no I/O
server/ Fastify API, background poller, storage adapter (SQLite now, Postgres in M4)
Design spec: docs/superpowers/specs/2026-08-01-reader-clone-design.md