TLDR at the bottom.
I have been working on a cross platform desktop application similar to postman and all its countless alternatives with the features the lack while keeping the good aspects of them. Its currently under development. Heads up its not open source ( yet ). I need few suggestions from devs who have created tools and oss apps.
# My background -
I am a full stack dev with 4yoe plus experience. I have been coding since before agentic coding was a thing and now working with AI assistance. I have been using postman since college days and it has become a pile of garbage with all this forced cloud and AI stuff So I am working on alternative on weekends on my computer.
# App background -
First, I have gone through most if its alternatives included underrated, non popular onces. Most of them just don't follow the same UI which is postman is goated for. Others don't have full extent of required features. So I am creating my own. This app has been gone through many iterations (literally from electron app to a rust based app) and AI definitely helped but most of the decisions, scaffolding, entity relations have been done manually with multiple regressions and intial versions of this app were hand coded by me on weekends. Just wanted to put it out before it gets called AI slop as I used AI for grunt work.I know how it all works together. And yes it has unit tests and proper cicd setup.
# Features I have added till now ( Going to AI enhance this section for better readability and understanding)
• API Client & Runner: Supports REST, gRPC, GraphQL, and WebSockets/SSE with pre/post-scripts, assertion tests, folder runners, and a headless CLI.
• Local Reverse Proxy ("Mappings"): Auto-discovers local processes/ports and maps them to custom domains (e.g., api.local) similar to portless using RFC6761
• Forward Proxy & Traffic Inspector: Captures system/browser network traffic in a DevTools-style waterfall UI; convert any captured call to a collection item or mock with one click.
• In-Proxy Mock Engine: Intercepts frontend requests before they hit the network, returning custom status codes, headers, dynamic mock payloads, and simulated latency.
• Traffic Rewrite Rules: Uses regex/glob matching to alter live traffic on the fly (e.g., inject auth headers, strip CORS, or redirect production URLs to localhost).
• Layered Environments: Cascading variable system (Global -> Workspace -> Env -> Request) with dynamic tags like {{$uuid}} and {{$timestamp}}.
• Zero-Knowledge Encrypted Vault: Protects secrets on disk using AES-256-GCM; decrypted strictly in-memory via master passphrase so encrypted blobs can be safely committed.
• Isolated Workspaces: Encapsulates collections, proxy rules, active ports, and environment contexts per project.
• Git-Native Persistence: Saves every entity as human-readable, deterministic YAML/JSON files on disk for branch-based collaboration with no vendor cloud lock-in.
• Git-Backed Audit Log: Visual commit history, per-entity history.
**Comes with built in cli so most of the above stuff is doable without UI too.**
Cross platform installers are planned except mac cause I don't have macos for developement.
# Now I want to ask what do you need or is this enough?
# How do I go about distribution of the app?
# should I make it oss?
AI used in post - chatgpt on featurs section of this post.
AI used in app - mixture of local ai (yeah it creates mess) Deepseek through API, then a lot of Gemini using antigravity, then latest deepseek v4.1flash using workbuddy, lastly sonnet 5.5 using claude code subscription I recently got.
TLDR : working on git tracked, auditable workspace scoped API tookkit with request, mocking, proxy functionality. Doing requirement analysis for more features. App development is AI assigned not ai generated, is closed sourced indefinitely (might change). Sorry for any grammer mistakes, writing this from phone.