Alternatives
Products that do what Writekin – fine-tune a local LLM on your own writing, on your Mac does
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…
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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…
2024 · github.com
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Hi HN! In trying to improve my Chinese skills, I built this tool that lets me write a mix of Chinese and English, then recommends a proper Chinese expression. This is super helpful when I want to write something in Chinese but I don't know all the vocab/grammar - I can enter my best effort and use English for the parts I don't know. Really, the fundamental benefit of the tool is that it encourages me to exercise the writing muscle, rather than defaulting to translating from English. My goal was to build something that is fast, relatively inexpensive, and not prone to misleading people.…
2024 · unscrambler.dpw.me
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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
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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
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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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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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Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRFOWNpb3U4 Imagine having the CMD+K functionality of Cursor.sh but instead of code you edit natural language. *Introducing Fixkey:* - Native Swift macOS app (no Electron) - Keyboard-centric - Select common prompts with keyboard shortcuts - Press one shortcut to select and fix the current paragraph - Create custom prompts just in time - Works in every application on macOS (Apple Notes, Obsidian, Notion, Gmail, Slack…) - Support for local running models (Beta) *Why not using Grammarly?:* I always feel that traditional grammar correction…
2024 · fixkey.ai
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Hey HN! While writing prompts for a few projects recently, a couple of friends and I realised that writing prompts today is like writing code in a txt file - it sucks and there is no tooling to help you. So we decided to hack on a tool to help you fix this - https://optimist.varied.ai/ It is literally a hack rn but we already find it useful for writing prompts. That said we'd love to talk to folks who are writing serious prompts everyday and see how the product can be better. Also the only reason the waitlist is there, is running this is super expensive like $100/day for…
2023 · optimist.varied.ai
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I can't say "I created a tool" because obviously I only had an idea, then asked Cursor to implement it and 15 minutes later it was ready ;) Often I found I was manually replacing em dashes with hyphens in AI-generated text before I use them in copy, PR descriptions etc. It still feels like a shame to flare the text "you wrote" was not really human made. To automate these removals, here it is: super tiny online page. I made it for myself, but whoever wants, you can use it as well. I am not going to monetize it or promote more than this post.
May 2026 · undsh.com
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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
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Hey HN, this is deepan from trulytyped (https://trulytyped.com). I am building a document writing app which makes it extremely easy to figure out how a document was created. Now that any text can be AI generated, how do you tell if something was actually generated or composed. It is impossible to detect AI after a piece of text has been generated. No amount of watermarking, linguistic checks or vibe checks work consistently. The AI detectors that schools and journals use are easy to bypass. Why do we need to solve this problem - First of all, this is not an anti-AI stance. I have…
May 2026 · trulytyped.com
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I read Markdown all day, mostly Claude .md, and other AI outputs. Every app I have tried felt janky or too much work to just read an md file. I just wanted to open a .md file and read it the way Preview opens a PDF. So I built Kite, a Markdown reader for Mac. It has QuickLook just like Preview and I have baked in features that help people reading lot's of AI markdowns. It one-time purchase, no subscription. I put it on TestFlight so you can try it before paying anything. I would really like this crowd to try to break it. Tell me which files render wrong,what feels off, what is missing.…
Jun 2026 · kitemarkdown.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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I’ve spent the last 2.5 months building a product that runs LLM-powered code reviews on my pull requests — and I just launched it. The tool is built specifically for solo developers. You install it on your repo, trigger a scan by creating a pull request, and it leaves structured review comments using OpenAI under the hood. Funnily enough, I used the dev version of this app to review its own pull requests while building it. It helped me spot bugs, simplify structure, and keep quality high — all with minimal need for another human in the loop. Things I want to try out in the next months : -…
2025 · codii.dev
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Today I come to you on this beautiful Friday with a freshly hardthink-ed solution to a proliferous problem plaguing our world: the loss of original voice. The blanket of blandness slowly suffocating centuries of writing. Or to put it bluntly: AI writing is trash. It is disrespectful to expect ME to read something YOU could not even be bothered to write (or likely even read). The lingering human connection that remained resilient on the internet - through years of SEO optimisation, propaganda bots, ads, regional firewalls, politics, censorship - is now being diluted even further. Many of the…
Feb 2026 · tropes.fyi
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Write 10x faster - Fix grammar, tone & plagiarism in 1 click
9d ago · codepen.io
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