Syzygy: research together, in alignment.
A free, open-source desktop workspace for collaborative research. Draft, question your sources with a locally running AI engine, and — when you choose to — share a project folder with collaborators over Google Drive. Local by default, shared on purpose.
Early development — installers ship from GitHub releases and update themselves in-app.
Research projects
Collect sources, notes, drafts, and conversations in one workspace. Projects live on your machine and stay organized by the questions you are actually asking.
Ask your sources
An Ask mode with configurable experts puts a locally running AI engine to work on your own documents — question a project’s sources, draft against them, and keep a running transcript per tab.
Collaborate through Drive
Optionally link a Google account and share a project folder with collaborators. Syzygy uses Google’s narrowest Drive permission (drive.file): it can only see folders and files it created itself.
Local-first, open source
The AI engine runs on your computer; your documents are yours. MIT licensed, with the full source on GitHub and in-app updates from signed releases.
The narrowest scope Google offers.
Collaboration is opt-in. If you link a Google account, Syzygy requests only the drive.file scope — it can read and write the project folders it creates, and nothing else in your Drive. Tokens stay on your computer, there is no Penumbra server in the middle, and you can unlink from inside the app or revoke access from your Google account at any time. The details live in the privacy policy.
Sister app to Aphelion.
Aphelion is the point in an orbit farthest from the sun — the Penumbra app that keeps AI at the farthest point from the cloud. A syzygy is the moment bodies come into alignment — the Penumbra app for working in alignment with other people. Same engineering, same local-first spine, two different jobs.