I got a fun little email today from the folks at GitHub letting me know my vibe-coded novel-writing program was a top open source project for 2026! Tens of thousands of people are now writing their next project in NEO, which is absolutely bonkers to me.

There’s a mention of NEO in the Octoverse Report as well.

I’ve been begging for this exact tool for a decade now. Tried several times to get developers to make it, even hired someone to code it for me, but never got a working prototype that was any better than just sticking with Word.

Earlier this year I gave all my blog posts about NEO to Claude and had something in a weekend that was already better than anything I’d ever used before. My writing became easier and more fun, my WIPs completely organized. Others found NEO and started using it and offering suggestions and their own improvements. Now it has nearly 40 contributors, has been forked hundreds of times, and is being used by writers around the world!

And then this email. Pretty cool to solve a problem for yourself and find so many others who needed the same tool. As always, NEO is free and open source, so it’s there for anyone to use or modify as they see fit. Now, back to writing…