An open-source, AI-native successor to HyperCard. A script can stop and ask a language model, and the stack stays editable the whole time it runs.
on mouseUp
put ai("Summarize this card") into field "Summary"
end mouseUp
The playground is the full application, compiled to WebAssembly. Nothing you make leaves your machine unless you ask a model about it.
🍎 In 1987, Apple shipped HyperCard, and software stopped being something only programmers made.
You drew a button, typed two lines of plain English, and that was the app. No project file. No compiler. Sounds familiar?
- 👩🏫 Teachers wrote their own courseware
- 🏛️ Museums ran kiosks on it
- 🏝️ Myst was made in it
It came free on every Mac for over a decade. Then it was gone, and nothing quite took its place.
HyperLab picks the idea back up, with language models part of HyperTalk itself.
🕯️ Dedicated to Bill Atkinson (1951–2025), who wrote QuickDraw, MacPaint and HyperCard, and insisted the last of them ship free with every Mac.
Open any of these and it starts running in the playground. Switch to the edit tool to read the scripts behind it.
- Cluedo The board is drawn artwork and every room on it is a button, so you close the case by clicking your way around the mansion.
- Myst Wander the island and the Ages it leads to, and try not to open the wrong book. Go ▸ Map finds that trap by reading the scripts, without running any of them.
- Language Models, Explained How a language model works, one drawn slide at a time, with the paper to read next under each of them. Near the end it asks a real one, and says so plainly when you have not set one up.
- Address Book Shows what backgrounds are for: everyone gets their own card, while the layout they all sit on is edited once.
- Recipe Box Doubles a recipe by pulling the number out of each ingredient line, which is what chunk expressions are for.
- Todo Adds whatever you type to the list, then walks back through it to count what is still outstanding.
HyperLab works with no provider configured. AI ▸ Settings takes Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, a local Ollama, or a mock that answers offline.
Your API key stays in your browser. The site is static files; requests go from your browser directly to your provider, and no command reads a saved key back out. The sidebar shows the exact text of everything sent.
The assistant works through the same commands you do, so its changes are undoable like any other.
A .dmg, an .msi, and a .deb,
.rpm or .AppImage on the
releases page. A stack downloaded from the playground opens in the application; it is the
same file.
Every export the application offers works in the playground too: PDF, a PNG of the map, a self-contained web page, and a Decker deck.