diff --git a/proposal.txt b/proposal.txt
index 576f2f0..0307e84 100644
--- a/proposal.txt
+++ b/proposal.txt
@@ -159,6 +159,18 @@ data that authors could use to encode program text. embedding a
 font/tileset just for handling metadata feels very heavy but it would
 ensure authors can display metadata in any language they can draw.
 
+TOOLING
+
+one advantage of this proposal is that assemblers can just produce
+"uxn0" and let some other tool prepend metadata later. authors could
+run a metadata tool which reads a uxn rom along with the desired
+strings and icon data and produces a full-featured "uxn1" rom.
+
+additionally it would be fairly easy to write tools to extract the
+metadata from roms into other formats that are easy for external tools
+to work with (e.g. PNG or BMP for icons, JSON or TXT for metadata,
+etc.)
+
 CONCLUSION
 
 adding metadata to roms is undoubtedly annoying but will pay real