On a new interface for writing

I want to share some ideas I've had about how we can build better AI systems for writing and knowledge management. These stem out of my experience writing with Obsidian and using Claude and Perplexity as both intuition and refinement engines.

[!important] The text you see here is from LM Sacasas's "What do Human Beings Need". I have used it here only for illustration purposes. I don't own or am not a contributor to it. All the illustrations here do not show how to improve the article but provide examples of how an interface can be built. I really admire Michael's writing and urge you to read his original article here linked above.

Chat as an interface is insufficient for writing, journalling and thinking more broadly. I believe it is an intermediate interface until we have more involved and capable models.

Conclusivity - chat replicates conversations. Speech is ephemeral and final. You have a thought, you voice the thought, someone hears it and they render their glimpse of your thought. The chat interface mimics this well but this cannot cross over into writing. Writing, journalling, etc. is fundamentally iterative. It's not decisive or be-all-end-all. You have to write, rewrite, read, reread, edit, delete, copy, search and do it over and over again. Chat is poorly suited to keep up with this.

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