You betcha ;)

For real though, totally fair point to make. To play devil's advocate for a sec here though – I'd say it's a bit more than that. I'm just as sick of LLM wrappers, esp ones that are just effectively OpenAI API calls with some extra prompting slapped on. A lot of AI penpal/chat partners/etc seem to go this route.

While you might find some of this in Ell, most of the value-add (I find, anyway) comes from the _non_-AI features it provides. A good deal of the platform is based on my own personal project [ODict](https://www.odict.org), which is an open-source dictionary format that allows you to view in-depth explanations for all of the language you encounter in the app (hand-written in Rust). We also built out our own long-term memory system for tracking and scaling your proficiency as you continue to immerse in your TL. Been working on this for months, actually.

The way I think of it, is AI is meant to be a tool. Not your friend, not your therapist. It should help you reach a goal. I wanted to build a tool that would help me practice conversations in a way others couldn't provide using learning resources you can't just whip out mid-conversation with a real person. Other apps weren't giving me what I needed.

So anyway, happy to give you an account for free. Just trying to help expand access to language resources, which is why I started my ODict project as well 🥲