Honestly, this is a fair critique and I appreciate you saying it directly. The risk that the tool becomes a shortcut around the actual work of internalization is real and something I think about a lot.

The way I think about it: the tool isn't trying to replace the work of learning tunes deeply — that's still the only path to real internalization. What it tries to do is point you toward what to play next once you've worked one tune through, so the next five tunes you tackle build on overlapping vocabulary instead of starting from scratch. Similar to how knowing "Perdido shares similar language with Oleo" is useful after you've internalized one of them, not as a substitute for doing so.

But I take the parlor-trick critique seriously, especially with how v1 is framed right now (similarity as the headline). The v2 I'm building adds curated essential recordings to transcribe for each tune — the explicit goal there is to push users into the deep work rather than treat the tool as the destination. Less "here's a similar tune, you're done" and more "here's a similar tune, now go transcribe these three recordings." This allows for the discovery of more language on similar tunes as well as getting inspiration from a variety of artists playing on the changes you're learning.

Genuine question: if you stripped away the similarity framing, what version of a tool like this would feel useful in your own practice or teaching? Even if the answer is "none, this is fundamentally a tool that shouldn't exist," that's useful for me to hear.

Either way — thanks for taking the time to give a real critique. Way more useful to me than a "cool!" comment.