by haswell | 2025-04-10 21:24:30+00:00
I avoid criticizing what I haven't read. It's possible I misunderstood the project and post. Here are the things that jumped out at me and where my reply came from.

The title "Like cursor, but for blogging" primed me to expect a cursor-like capability, which I associate with iteratively producing generative output. While I find AI-assisted coding a dual-edged sword - it can be useful in the right hands, but risky in the wrong hands - I dislike the idea of text authored in the same way for the reasons I outlined above.

Later on, you mentioned tools you tried including Cursor, and called out that it's optimized for coding, not writing. These examples further reinforced my inclination to mentally model your tool as cursor-like.

Further down, you highlight the "Research Assistant" feature, which includes a "Generate topic suggestions" button. This is where alarm bells started going off in my head. Maybe this is more of a reflection of my own reading habits, but the content I gravitate to is usually about something the author already wanted to write about, and I interpreted this feature as a way to come up with ideas about what to write about.

In the conclusion, you mention adding autocompletion, and those alarm bells got louder. I've spent time experimenting with various auto-completion tools, and in the context of writing, they rub me the wrong way. This is where the concern about a growing disconnect between the author and the content comes from. When every word I type is followed by a computer prompt guiding me in one direction or another, the nature of what I write becomes entirely different. My brain is no longer the generator, but an evaluator. The words written are no longer my own...or are they? Would they have been? Hard to say. But as a form of human-to human communication, it makes me uncomfortable.

> I explicitely say "ChatGPT and Claude tends to write in a generic style erases my personal tone of voice. I don't want to create "AI slop", I just want to write more efficiently."

The way I read this, especially in conjunction with the two bullet points following it, was that you found existing tools insufficient as-is because they replace your personal tone of voice, and this was the motivation to build a tool that doesn't replace your tone of voice. I didn't interpret this as: "I won't use the output of AI in my writing", just that the big existing tools aren't doing a good job of sounding like you.

> My purpose with this tool is not to just dump what ChatGPT says into a document, but make it easier to research sources, find images, and proofread my writing.

I think a tool that is highly constrained to contextual information gathering and helping analyze what you write is useful. I mentioned something similar in a reply above [0]. While I didn't mean to imply you were just dumping LLM output into your posts, I did interpret the post to mean that the LLM had a more active role in authoring the post.

In retrospect, I think it's possible I took all of this the wrong way. But even after reading the post a 2nd time, I can still read it both ways.

This isn't necessarily your fault - I think the issue is that the current tech landscape is filled with tools and people eager to use those tools to pump out content. When I read "write more efficiently", my mind goes to the tools that promise the same thing and accomplish it by generating slop. I realize you explicitly stated you don't want to contribute to slop, but that stated goal and what a tool does are potentially different things.

One suggestion - a very brief demo that shows the UI in operation would go far to clear up these misconceptions. The generative part of my own brain took the static examples and imagined outcomes that may be essentially hallucinations.

My apologies if I've gotten all of this wrong, and sorry for the book-length reply. I'm hoping that brain-dumping what led to my original train of thought will help explain why I wrote what I did.

- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43645302