Tolaria summer update: HTML blocks, barbell dev, and a CI migration
This month’s Tolaria dev log from Luca Rossi covers a barbell strategy between polish and moonshots, a CircleCI migration, and the first glimpse of HTML blocks that pull live data from notes.
The barbell: basics and moonshots
Luca framed this month’s work around two extremes. On one end: hardening the core editor experience with block selection and navigation (Notion-style) and collapsible headings and list items (Bear-style). On the other: shipping ambitious ideas to see what sticks.
The long tail of basics also includes opening vaults in separate windows, more MCP tools, and more granular controls for AI agents.
The moonshot: HTML blocks with live note references
You can now create HTML blocks inside Tolaria. The blocks can reference properties from any note and use a set of formulas to render lists and format values in real time.
This builds on the same system that already lets spreadsheets reference note properties. Luca describes it as planting the seeds for building mini apps inside Tolaria that pull live information from your notes.
️ Tools powering the workflow
The Tolaria Alliance launched this month and is what keeps the project free and open source. The current tool stack:
- CodeScene for code health monitoring across the codebase
- Codacy for code quality and security
- Unblocked to help agents and Luca fetch context from the codebase, ADRs, GitHub issues, and commit history
- CircleCI for local validation and remote CI, migrated this month
What’s coming
Luca says performance work earned its own chapter in the full article, including a mini workflow to prevent degradation over time. The full post at refactoring.fm also covers forking open source, custom gates for agent constraints, and notes on GPT usage with the latest models.
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