I built an AI Tool to write medium posts 10x faster.
Tags: writing, ai, tooling, productivity
Published: 2022-07-06 15:52:06

In 2020, I fell in love with blogging here on Medium. Articles are fun to write, provide value for others, and even make a little money. It's a perfect combination!

But, there's one really, really annoying issue with writing.

**It's. So. Time-consuming.**
 
Even a simple post like this one takes me 4 or 5 hours to write. This heavily limits my output. If I'm going to write a new post, I have to mentally commit to giving up a day of my life to do it. And that shouldn't be the case.

So, I decided to analyze how I spend my time while crafting a new article. This was the breakdown.

![time spent writing medium blog post](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/emi95y9pltrle14u2t3y.png)

The most shocking finding: I spend 50% of my time editing.

But, thinking back, that makes sense. I have many unpublished rough drafts that I simply haven't finished because of the time commitment of editing. So, I set out to solve this problem.

I found some tools that would help me write faster, but they usually added another layer of workflow complexity. Either I'd need to write in a completely separate editor, or get only half the functionality I wanted.

So, I decided to set out and build my own tool to write medium posts fast.

Introducing, my AI writing tool for medium.

I'll note, this was just an experiment. I made a local version to test, but after finding how much time it's saved me I thought it would be cool to share.

It looks something like this:


![AI tool for medium writers](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/om91uuvs2syvmx6ej8e6.png)
 
This general gist is that the tool combines AI and traditional grammar-checking to make editing a breeze. Idea generation can be done on-the-fly as the AI creates sentence suggestions. Trimming down long, confusing, or badly worded sentences is easy as-well because the suggestions are available right in the medium editor.

Plus, it's just a chrome extension. Everything is still done in the medium editor so my workflow isn't compromised.

Here's a taste of some of the functionality I found to be most useful:


### 💡 AI Brainstorming - Title & subtitle suggestions using AI

![AI-powered title and subtitle brainstorming for medium articles](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/hyow1p0l7wq3ggqkqtmf.png)
 
This is huge. The AI hooks into a database of millions of blog posts to give title suggestions based on patterns seen elsewhere. Since I usually don't go with my first title, this feature makes brainstorming easy.

Plus, the AI uses the content of your post to guide its suggestions. As I add more content to a post, I get new and different title ideas that I might not've thought of before.


### ✅ Grammar checking - directly in the medium editor

![AI powered medium grammar checking](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/6p378ediw1aa4rjd73fd.png)
 
Usually this is the most time-consuming part of writing. It's hard to write perfect sentences the first time, so a grammar checking tool is an absolute must for me.

Usually, I offload this work to another tool. But copying the content back and forth can become a pain. I added this functionality to my tool so it can all be done on Medium's editor. No more time-wasting.


### ✨ Sentence suggestions - rewrite & brainstorm with AI

![AI powered sentence writing for Medium](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/l9b534o8wrpqx5k8i3yk.png)

This is one of my favorite features. As I write, the AI will offer suggestions for ways to rewrite a sentence or continue a train of thought. I don't always use these suggestions, but they keep me thinking about how to flow my thoughts together and I find that *invaluable*.

## What's Next

I built this tool as a simple local chrome extension for myself. I've thought of providing it publicly, but it would be a lot of work to take it over the finish line.

*Is this something people would be interested in?*

Like I said, it would take a lot of effort to deliver it publicly, but if this is something people would use then I might give it a shot. I've even thought of ideas to make it more powerful.

Things like hooking into other tools to generate images on-demand. But again, I mostly built it to work for my use-case so I'd be interested to hear how others would find this helpful.