Alternatives
Products that do what I built an open-source Apple Intelligence-like Writing Tool for Windows does
As a high school student, I love LLMs and the execution of Apple's Appel Intelligence Writing Tools, but was disappointed that nothing like that existed for Windows. So, I created Writing Tools, a better than Apple Intelligence open-source alternative that works system-wide on Windows! Key features: - Uses Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash model for superior AI-assisted writing (much better than the tiny 2B parameter Apple Intelligence model) - Works in any application with a customizable hotkey - Proofreads, rewrites, summarizes, and more - Free and privacy-focused (your API key stays local, no…
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I posted this previously, but there's been a major update. As a high school student, I love LLMs and the execution of Apple's Appel Intelligence Writing Tools, but was disappointed that nothing like that existed for Windows. I thus created Writing Tools, a better than Apple Intelligence open-source alternative that works system-wide on Windows. It's much better than the tiny 2B parameter Apple Intelligence model! Features (works system-wide): 1. Select text in a textbox, press the hotkey, and optimise your text in a click (proofread, rewrite, tone changes, custom instructions...). You can…
2024 · github.com
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- 8AD
Hi all, I threw together a small prototype I am calling “Notepad.ai”. A new take on UIs for interacting with LLMs. While I enjoy using LLM’s in the chat format I wanted to see what it would be like to do it in a more long form style. It let’s you write in a pretty free form, much like Window’s Notepad, but you can choose to hit ctrl+[ to analyze the text with a preset prompt of your choosing. It has a few other small features. It’s WIP and very experimental. I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts. Video: https://youtu.be/ntdlgFmSxQY Live Demo:…
2024 · github.com
- 9WF
Hey Hacker News! I built Writekin over the past week because I was tired of AI writing that didn't sound like me, even though I had just used AI to clean it up, rather than wholesale write it. The usual fixes I found online for this were: - Some sort of SKILL.md, or - A system prompt full of rules to strip the generic AI tells (e.g. no em-dashes, none of the stock phrases, varying the sentence length, etc). While those cleaned up the surface a bit, Pangram still came back as ~100% AI written, which was frustrating, as again it was mainly taking my sloppy copy and tweaking it. So when…
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 10TC
Hi HN, I'm thrilled to share with you think, a command-line tool that I developed while diving back into the programming scene. For the past few years, my focus had shifted from hands-on programming to managerial roles, my last one being at Affirm (I started Affirm's Polish office). However, I recently left my job to revisit my passion for coding and see if I could still write code that works. Not to mention that with what is currently going on in AI if you are a developer this probably the best possible time for a sabbatical in human history :) My first attempt was with LangChain, but I…
2023 · github.com
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I've been wondering how I could use LLMs to help me write, without taking my own voice away. I arrived at a workflow where the AI has strict instructions not to give me any text, just to give me tips, but it was clunky to see which parts of the text the critique referred to. To solve it, I made Lucid. I made it mostly for myself, but I added a "bring your own key" system for others to use it. I hope you like it!
May 2026 · writelucid.cc
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2017 · itunes.apple.com
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Hey HN, I've been working on something cool that I wanted to share with you all. It's called Viewpoint, an analytics tool for LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic models, and Gemini. The idea came from the constant flood of new LLM models and the need to figure out which ones work best for my projects without breaking the bank. With viewpoint, I can track token usage, costs, latency(WIP), and traffic over time, making it easier to compare different models and see which ones perform best and save money. The tool works asynchronously, so it doesn't add any latency to your LLM requests, and you have…
2024 · viewpointhq.com
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Hey HN! Thank you for all the support and feedback on my original submission 2 months ago. I've been improving the backend using a MCTS/AlphaZero approach and it's currently producing much better results. My long term goal is to allow users to manage multiple projects, deployed autonomously, both from scratch and by making continual updates all prompted with natural language. The cost of each project has been lowered to $9 as performance with smaller models has improved (I migrated from Claude-3-Opus to gemini-1.5-flash). Thanks for checking it out!
2024 · saas-quick.com
- 15IM
I really struggle to keep my notes organised, and often can't make any sense of hand written notes after meetings. I did some experiments with Claude and ChatGPT where I blast random thoughts at them during a meeting or brainstorming session and then have them output a nice document that pulls it all together at the end. It worked incredibly well but it was a bit cumbersome to keep sending messages to the chat and telling the ai each time what to do. So I took the idea and built a tool, it makes it easy to throw random notes and voice recordings (images and document support on the way) and…
2025 · scatternote.com
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Hey HN, We’re excited to share PySpur, an open-source tool that provides a graph-based interface for building, debugging, and evaluating LLM workflows. Why we built this: Before this, we built several LLM-powered applications that collectively served thousands of users. The biggest challenge we faced was ensuring reliability: making sure the workflows were robust enough to handle edge cases and deliver consistent results. In practice, achieving this reliability meant repeatedly: 1. Breaking down complex goals into simpler steps: Composing prompts, tool calls, parsing steps, and branching…
2024 · github.com
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Hey everyone! I've developed Gemini Engineer, an AI-powered CLI tool for software developers, using the Gemini API! This tool aims to assist with project creation, file management, and coding tasks through AI. It's still in development, and I'd love to get feedback from fellow developers like you. Check out the project on GitHub: https://github.com/ozanunal0/gemini-engineer Please give it a try and share your thoughts, suggestions, or any bugs you find. Thanks a bunch!
2025 · github.com
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I built this toolkit with my colleague to dive deep into OS internals and automate the identification of privilege escalation vectors. Written in pure C without external dependencies, it explores everything from Linux capabilities and Docker escapes to Windows token manipulation and service permissions. We believe that the constant struggle between breaking and securing systems is the ultimate driver of software evolution. This tool is our contribution to that cycle, designed for researchers who want to understand how low-level misconfigurations can be discovered and audited across different…
Jan 2026
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I’ve been building LLM tooling for a small VC fund and found myself explaining the same mental model over and over to non-technical people around me: how a stateless LLM becomes a chatbot, how tool use works, what an agent is mechanically, and why context windows shape all of it. I never found a guide that covered that full chain at the level I wanted, so I wrote one. It’s nine short chapters, each building on the last. Deliberately simplified: the goal is a useful mental model, not a textbook. Feedback, corrections, and contributions welcome: github.com/ymyke/aiaiai
Apr 2026 · aiaiai.guide
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I'm trying to get the motivation up to actually finish building out a "real" product, and I found myself needing a "win" to keep my momentum up. So, I hacked out a little one sentence journal app last night. I experimented with a few UI things (e.g.., the autosaving of the sentence for today and so on), so it was a good learning experience also. You can check it out at: http://osod.im
2012
- 21KA
I'm building out Kerns, as an AI environment for research. You can seed a space with a topic and multiple source documents, and complete your research completely in one space. There's interactive mindmaps for exploration, podcast mode, powerful source readers with original plus chapter level summaries that let you zoom into source on demand, a powerful chat agent that lets you control context and cite refs, and AI assisted note taking. My goal is to have one place to do research on any topic which minimizes manual context engineering, and jumping around between chat/notes/readers.…
Nov 2025 · kerns.ai
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Hey HN! I develop browser extensions, I suck at web design, and I've been exploring AI/LLMs. With my new found free-time since dropping work hours, I've developed a Design Copilot browser extension [0]. It does what it says on the tin - you choose a part of your website and the tool gives you instant expert design feedback - "change this font to that, add this much whitespace, use brighter colours .... etc" The tool is completely 100% free to use, its powered by bringing your own AI API Key, and the current LLM it uses is Google Gemini 1.5 Pro. I've yet to hit the free rate-limit and I…
2024 · old.reddit.com
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Hello, HN! After weeks of being frustrated with bloated software and AI writing tools, I decided to make something different—something simpler. That's how I created Fleschkey, my privacy-first, AI-free text editor. Fleschkey is for writers who want their work to be clear. It gives instant feedback with a readability score based on the Flesch-Kincaid formula, made in 1975—a system that's been used in many ways since then. To me, privacy means more than opting in or out. It means no one can see or take your data unless there's a good reason. That’s why everything stays on your device—no cloud,…
2024 · fleschkey.com
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Hey HN, I built a tool to solve my biggest LLM workflow frustration: context switching. The idea came from trying to meta-prompt in Cursor, I found myself constantly jumping to a browser or dedicated AI app just to improve a prompt. This copy/paste/tweak cycle was a huge productivity killer. I wanted AI to integrate seamlessly into my workflow, not disrupt it. That's why I built Promptive. It's a native macOS app that lets you select any text, in any application, and run a custom LLM prompt on it with a global keyboard shortcut or right-click and select the action in the…
2025 · promptiveai.app
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