Kira Howe
Kira Howe is an independent Canadian software developer and open-source creator who builds full-stack web applications, data-processing and visualization tools, and developer tooling. Her stated focus is making software simple, reliable, durable, and enjoyable to operate and maintain, with Clojure as her language of choice.
At a Glance
- Clojure and Babashka developers
- Software engineering and developer-tooling teams
- Data engineering, data science, and visualization practitioners
- Developers using coding agents and AI-assisted development
- +1 more
AI Tools by Kira Howe
(1)
editmd
Native macOS Markdown Editor
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Latest News
editmd 0.2.0 adds per-agent change tracking, color-coded highlights, editable agent labels, and a WebKit caret workaround.
Personal agents need a new kind of harness: Kira describes building a useful, secure personal agent without shell access to reduce data-exfiltration risk.
editmd 0.1.0 launches as a native macOS Markdown editor with real-time merging of agent edits, file-preserving serialization, autosave, Mermaid, and remote-content protections.
slk 0.30.0 adds a read-only Slack canvas viewer, an unread section, and fixes for dropped connections and new-user configuration.
Products & Services
A small native macOS editor that lets users edit rendered Markdown like a word processor while saving plain Markdown. It preserves front matter, links, images, encoding, line endings, and other file details; supports GitHub-flavored Markdown, Mermaid diagrams, source view, autosave, and live merging/highlighting of concurrent edits made by coding agents. Free and open source under MIT; macOS 14 or later.
A fast test runner for clojure.test on Babashka and JVM Clojure. It runs namespaces in parallel worker processes, supports watch mode that reruns affected tests, shows useful failure output, and is designed as a Kaocha-compatible replacement for many workflows.
A fork of a Slack terminal user interface that Kira relentlessly customizes. Recent releases add a read-only Slack canvas viewer, unread-message surfacing, and fixes for dropped connections, races, keyboard behavior, and new-user configuration.
A Clojure library for calling LLMs with ordinary functions and data, including text generation, streaming, tool calls, structured data, embeddings, and model evaluations. It supports Anthropic, OpenAI-compatible providers, and Ollama; the public API was in alpha development.
Market Position
Kira Howe operates as a solo open-source developer rather than a conventional software company. Her work is differentiated by a Clojure-first approach, practical data and visualization experience, and tools aimed at the emerging workflow where humans and coding agents edit, test, and reason about software together. editmd overlaps with Markdown/WYSIWYG editors such as Typora and Obsidian, while volley overlaps with Clojure test runners such as Kaocha; the projects emphasize agent-aware workflows, file fidelity, and developer ergonomics.
Founding Story
Kira Howe's site describes a personal practice rather than a company: she builds applications she has always wished existed and uses open source to share the work. She currently works full time at Seeq and develops open-source projects in her spare time; her recent work is shaped by practical needs around Clojure development, coding agents, data workflows, and personal knowledge management.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Kira's official profile says she works full time for Seeq and also does consulting. Her public projects are presented as free/open-source software and libraries, with no public subscription, license, or usage-based pricing model identified.
Pricing Tiers
editmd is explicitly described as free and open source under the MIT license; several other public repositories are also MIT-licensed or open-source projects.
Target Markets
- Clojure and Babashka developers
- Software engineering and developer-tooling teams
- Data engineering, data science, and visualization practitioners
- Developers using coding agents and AI-assisted development
- Teams seeking open-source process, architecture, or mentoring support
- Clojure and Babashka application development
- Data-intensive web applications and visualization
- Running large Clojure test suites efficiently
- Editing Markdown documentation while coding agents modify the same files
- Building applications and workflows around LLMs
- Exploring Clojure's data-science ecosystem through hosted notebooks