Alternatives
Products that do what I made a community-based writing application does
Hi HN! Writing has been a big part of my life for the last few years. It's helped me make sense of the world around me through journaling, and my blog and technical books have made wonders for my career as an engineer. Something I've always been missing is an online community where I can practice my skills and learn from other aspiring writers. I built Tavern, hoping to solve my own problem. Its main concept is that every Monday everyone in the app gets asked the same writing prompt and you have seven days to submit your answer. You can look at what others have posted, but only after you've…
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- 2WA
2014 · writerkata.com
- 3AP
Hi HN! Me and my buddy made this in a weekend as an experiment in 1. building something quickly and putting it out there and 2. using AI in an interesting way; in this case a poetry judge. Our “judge” isn’t perfect, but the hope is that at least it’s a relatively fair system that everyone can be sure evaluates their work. Anyway, we wanted to see what the lovely people of HN think of it. Some background on the idea; I like poetry and thought it would be cool if there was a big competition with a large financial incentive that scales with the number of participants. Using AI as a judge allows…
2023 · acontestofwords.com
- 4OI
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
- 5IM
I am a non-hacker "idea guy" with zero discernible talent. Like most, the story starts with me doing things the hard way. I dreamt of a tool that would save me countless hours. Like most of my ideas, it was supposed to die in a couple of hours, but this one had some legs.... "If I needed this, surely others did too" kept looping in my head. Could I get this built? Could I build it myself? Nah...too lazy to learn how, but before I did anything, I had to promise myself one thing: No more ideas! If ideas were sit-ups, I would have a six pack instead of this tire. It was a constant mental…
2012
- 67T
I am happy to announce the updated release of my web app, 7courses. http://7courses.com/ 7courses makes it ridiculously easy to jot down and manage your collection of recipes. As someone who cooks, I often find recipes online or in cookbooks, but have no way to organize them. I have been looking for a digital "recipe box". After plenty of searching I just made my own. 7courses was built around the idea that you should be able to choose how you want to organize your recipes, and doing so should be easy and quick. The UI is responsive and intuitive, with a no frills design. Just jump right in…
2011
- 7SO
Hey HN, My co-founders and I have been working on a project for the last month or so, and we'd like to get your input on it. We wanted to hear your thoughts on what we're doing - so check out our landing page, and let us know what you think/understand. Does it sounds like something you guys would want to use? http://www.thesharedweb.com/alpha/intro We'll tell you guys more about exactly what we're doing as the conversation evolves, but we just wanted to see what the initial reaction is, and what you understand (i.e. are we describing it in a way that makes sense). Really excited to hear your…
2010 · thesharedweb.com
- 8KM
Over the last couple of months I have designed and written Keys, a Mac application the helps learning typing and that is supposed to meet Mac users standards for a well-designed application. My goal is to become a micro-ISV or indie developer. The app is only in the Mac app store for now (no trial yet), since end of May, and I have been busy putting together a website and a personal blog since. I would be very interested what the HN community thinks about the application, how you like it, and how it is presented, from a business angle. Prior to this project, I have done much more work on…
2012
- 9HN
Friends, Romans, HNers! Link: http://hackerbyte.com This is my first “weekend project” and it was really fun doing it. The sleepless weekends nights when all my friends were our partying or something we (me and two friends) were busy creating ‘hackerByte’ - a weekly newsletter to share inspiration with start-up people. Nothing fancy - just we’d like to share some really nice stuff we read and some news with you, every week. We know that newsletters like these already exist so why one more? Because we are not really satisfied with what they are doing and here is our version of the wheel. We…
2011
- 10FW
I’m specifically looking for a tool a user shared on here that facilitated writing for content by scrolling up and disappearing text as new text was inputted. I believe it was a HTML/JSS only solution - a small personal project. I’ve done a lot of focused searches, but haven’t been able to find this comment. That said, I love these sorts of projects. I know they’re a self-indulgence and often a distraction. I’m celebrating that for a moment, personally. Please share your favorites writing tools, the smaller and more personal the better.
2021
- 11AS
Hey HN community, I run a small team of writers that built TheRightMargin, a new writing platform that focuses on your goals first and is aiming to be the smartest writing tool on the market. We launched last summer actually, but we're trying to make a push for some growth, so I thought I'd debut it here on HN! The #1 'writer's block' pain point this app solves is helping you figure out your next step. We have some neat tools to break down your writing project into milestones and task and a way to write side by side with your plan. We also have smart tips and a timer for writing sprints,…
2017
- 12QG
This is a tool which lets you easily manage different versions of ideas, helpful for writing essays. I've found myself wanting this every single time I go through the drafting process when writing, and I've been frustrated every time I find myself accidentally working on an old draft just because there was a paragraph that I liked better. This solves it. I hope the community like this as much I enjoyed working on it! Note that it's currently a beta waitlist because there's some bugs with the undo/redo state management and so I want to dogfood it for a bit for reliability. It says April…
Mar 2026 · quillium.bryanhu.com
- 13IM
Hi HN! In the last couple of weeks I've been working on Cranki: Cranki = Crosswords + Anki. (It's a stupid name tbh, haha) I like doing crosswords in Spanish (to learn vocab) but none of the apps out there allowed me to use my own list of words that I come across. So I built one instead. It's entirely client-side. No server, no database, no accounts, etc. Your words and stats are stored in local storage. I built this for myself but let me know if you like it!
Apr 2026 · cranki.app
- 14HM
Hi, I'm Marcus. I've spent the last 15 months or so home-coding on a document database, after work, on weekends (every waking hour). My plans for this particular weekend was to implement log-structured writing. It went faster than I thought and the results were faster querying times and fast, append-only writes. I've been working on this for almost a decade and being this close to the finish line feels surreal. This is my seventh iteration I believe. Everytime I realized I had an architecture built on a bad model I walked away, often in fury, depressed over my weak coding abilities but…
2017
- 15SA
Over the past three months, I’ve been working with my dad on this app as a way to learn Cursor, shadcn/ui, and Next.js. I’m currently studying UX design at the University of Michigan, and I’ve been really impressed by how much vibe-coding tools have advanced over the last six months. This work journal includes private AI-generated insights with scheduled summaries that can be shared with your team or manager. You can also choose to make a summary public—like I’ve done here for my work on this web app: https://www.workjourney.ai/summary/mkblt2zt-hn2kdbus If anyone has…
Jan 2026 · workjourney.ai
- 16WI
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
- 17M4
Well HN, I've finally produced something I think is worthy of sharing, but I didn't do it "in a weekend". Yeah, it's an iOS puzzle game. And yeah, it's a game I built because I wanted to play it rather than based on market research, so all this sort of makes it the antithesis of a popular HN post. But whatever. Still hoping for some of that patented (har har) expert HN feedback. Critique any part of it except the music. Also, PM me for upgrade codes, or I can post some here if there's any interest. Download (it's free):…
2012
- 18IF
Hello there! I hope you're doing well today! I wanted to share something with you. Recently I was on the hunt for the best way to journal daily. Well, I had this idea - what if I could feed all my daily entries to an AI (ChatGPT), and create a friendly, supportive character like Socrates or Simon Sinek? This way, I could ask any questions about my life and mental health, and get some amazing advice on how to improve myself! The results have been absolutely mind-blowing ! I even made a short GIF to show you how it works - check it out! - https://gifyu.com/image/SdHLH I've…
2023
- 19YW
I created Thoughtly because many of my hobbies and interests - things I spend a lot of my time learning and writing about - are not reflected in my resume or in any single online profile. Written discussions online are generally insulated within specific communities (Stack Overflow, Reddit, Blogs, etc.), making it difficult for users to retain their credibility as they cross platforms. So we set out to quantify written discussion online and display them in a centralized portfolio. By enabling people to quickly display the extent of their involvement in a field, we provide context for online…
2014
- 20SA
Hello HN, My name is Deepak. I've created this platform (https://stackcrunch.io) where developers can share their experiences in form of short stories linked to real-world practical solutions on Q&A platforms. This project is currently in early access mode, where you can check out the platform & start writing your stories. Also, please do check out the launch article and how to create a story at https://stackcrunch.io/posts I'd love to hear back from the community. Warm Regards, Deepak
2018
- 21LW
Hello Hacker News! We bring to you today 2 things: 1. Our passion project - LaoTzu Writer Studio - a modern writing application 2. Thoughts on the abysmal state of Kickstarter - likely well known to you all, but having experienced it for the first time, it is disheartening So lets start with the good stuff: LaoTzu Writer Studio - LaoTzu helps you build the framework of a novel, but still leaves the writing for you to do. That means there are indeed AI elements - like our Guard section that flags inconsistent canon in your universe, or the analyze section that determines writing stats,…
May 2026
- 22AD
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
- 23BA
Writing is hard, and it's tempting to just let AI do the whole thing So I built an Obsidian plugin that keeps AI in its place Highlight a sentence, get some options, pick the one you like Sharpens your writing instead of automating it
Jun 2026 · rephrasethis.co
- 24IM
2021 · prosepen.com
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