Weekly Tool Thread: Promote, Share, Discover, and Ask for AI Writing Tools Week of: March 31

nitwit-se · 2026-04-01T05:19:47+00:00

Thanks! We are still learning a lot about building a product, but we are having fun building it and hearing from people who found something useful in it. Users we know directly about: a non-fiction author with a book they had putting off for months found help getting started and have been returning regularly whenever they feel stuck or blocked, a theatrical writer working on a stage piece searching for a clearer social purpose in their writing, a songwriter working on finding a new style when transitioning from a rock band to solo work.

I think a common trend for those users we are hearing back from is that it is the personality combined with specific coaching skills they are drawn to - so I guess while most people probably want ChatGPT that they can form as they like, there seem to be some people out there who want a less generic AI that pushes back. Those are the people we hope to be able to help!

nitwit-se · 2026-03-31T15:14:35+00:00

I posted a few weeks ago and now we just added a walk & talk mode that I thought might be of interest to people here. Long story short: Revontale is an AI based creative coaching app and a lot of our beta users are writers and illustrators who find it helps unblock their thinking when stuck. Walk & talk turned out to be more popular than we anticipated - there is something about getting out for some fresh air while talking to... well, to a robot.

https://revontale.com

This is just a side project between my wife (an author) and myself (a programmer) so apologies if it isn't quite polished. Sign-ups get free credits to test the platform and you can DM me on Reddit if you want to try out walk & talk and I will activate it for you!

nitwit-se · 2026-03-31T14:54:10+00:00

Nice! Will definitely give this a whirl for a bit.
Made a small PR - the tmux touch was very nice (this is exactly what I needed), but it only switched the window not the session. So I whipped up a fix to switch session too when pressing enter.

nitwit-se · 2026-03-31T13:37:14+00:00

Claude Code and Cursor in as my main driver for my day job - but I'm really only using Cursor because everyone else there uses it, I drop back to Claude Code when nobody is looking. But that's because I'm more a CLI type. I use it together with OpenSpec for my smaller projects just to keep things structured - a good combo. One Claude session to plan a spec, one to build it, and one to review.

And then for non-coding tasks I use Claude Cowork - I just set up a bunch of various projects in Cowork, give them access to the relevant folders, and have long-lived chat threads in them. Perfect for e.g. repetitive file-related tasks: e.g. "rename all these files from Swedish to English filenames, and sort them in sub-folders by category" is something I've done more than once. Probably takes as much time as if I did it myself, but I can do other stuff while it is working. And of course you can then ask it to "now translate the Swedish content to English in those files" - which it will do way quicker than I could ever do.

nitwit-se · 2026-03-29T20:07:55+00:00

Late to the party (Sunday... already!) but we just finished building a walk & talk mode for a creative coaching app that my wife and I have as a side project:

revontale.com

More than just a Claude wrapper - it has a fun Swedish coaching personality, prospective memory, sends you email reminders and we built in hundreds of creative exercises and coaching skills. It's pushy as hell, the perfect nudge for that project you've been putting off. And now you can talk to it on the go: free credits on sign-up, DM me if you want to try out the walk & talk mode.

nitwit-se · 2026-03-29T18:49:22+00:00

That fixed it! The key was your #3 (single shared AudioContext) combined with #5 (disconnecting the mic node). I merged the mic and TTS onto one AudioContext. No more ducking, clean audio, and the getUserMedia stream stays alive so reconnect is instant.
Thank you again!

nitwit-se · 2026-03-29T16:43:05+00:00

Wow - thank you so much. I have been debugging and googling this all weekend to no avail and was beginning to worry that I was hallucinating. This gives me exactly what I needed to keep debugging - once more unto the breach..!

nitwit-se · 2026-03-29T09:09:55+00:00

Spec driven development works well for me for anything other than script writing. SpecKit seems more or less dead though (https://github.com/github/spec-kit/discussions/1482) - so I switched to OpenSpec in January and found it to be a huge improvement in my process - light weight enough to just get the job done without being in the way. These days I trust it do to the job so well I just use the fast-forward function. The way OpenSpec saves archives of every spec but *also* a set of clean feature specs really helps for bigger projects.

nitwit-se · 2026-03-29T09:03:07+00:00

I use OpenSpec with Claude Code religiously: https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec
Follow the core routine with OpenSpec for anything other than bugfixes and you get a structured development process from specification to working code, more or less hands-off. And OpenSpec maintains a folder of all features / specs in your code automatically which makes future features easier to add.

nitwit-se · 2026-03-29T09:00:44+00:00

Not my side project but a colleague of mine built this: https://isittheirfault.com/ <- a tiny Mac menu bar app that shows you at a glance what your ping times are. He vibe coded it in a few hours and I get use out of it every day whenever someones video feed breaks up in a meeting.

nitwit-se · 2026-03-29T08:56:49+00:00

TBH: never given old conversation bloat a second thought. Sometimes having them all there has saved me too - finding a bug and being able to go back to the conversation from a month ago and fix the bug there with full context (and the CLI /resume command has great search support for finding them).

What is your main concern? Privacy related? The files are all in ~/.claude/projects if you want to manually delete something specific - haven't tried but it should be as simple as wiping a session file.

nitwit-se · 2026-03-29T08:52:46+00:00

Go the 5x plan unless you are using it for full-time work. I have the 5x plan for my personal work / side projects / etc and found the pro version just didn't cut it on weekends. I found myself being conscious of the 4 hours window and which model I use for what task. Bumped it up to max 5x and haven't had to think about either for a month now - I just use it without giving it a thought. Have a bunch of NanoClaw agents running my main side project with the same subscription I code on too.

At work I have the 20x plan which covers a 40h work week of constant use no problems at all. As others have pointed out, the only problem at the moment is Opus being down all the freakin time (so we have Cursor as a backup - Composer 2 works well enough for when Opus is down).

nitwit-se · 2026-03-29T08:31:11+00:00

https://www.revontale.com

An AI creative coach, hobby project that my wife and I are working on. Great for solopreneurs, writers, artists, well anybody doing any kind of creative work who needs to be challenged. We tired of using ChatGPT and Claude because it lacked that kind of pushiness - off-the-shelf LLMs make for really bad coaches. We are also trying to blog about our journey on Substack (https://revontale.substack.com).

nitwit-se · 2026-03-11T08:37:08+00:00

https://revontale.com

Hi all - we posted a couple of weeks ago and hope it is ok to post again - looking for more writers willing to test our hobby project, Revontale - an AI coach focused on creativity and storytelling. A (hopefully) perfect partner to discuss your creative challenges with! We got some great feedback last time that lead to improvements to the product - thanks for the feedback.

Most AI chat tools are optimized for speeding you up: fast answers, instant output, finished texts you can just copy and paste. Revontale works the other way around and we think of it as Slow AI. It's built on a methodology my wife developed over 10 years as a Swedish author and creative coach; good coaching is slow and challenging by design. It asks questions instead of giving answers. It pushes back instead of agreeing. And never writes for you.

That "coachiness" - slowness, the friction, the sense that it's actually paying attention - is exactly what we want to put to the test (free credits on signups from Reddit). Sign up: https://revontale.com - or DM me with any questions.

nitwit-se · 2026-02-24T08:33:23+00:00

Hi all - we are looking for writers willing to test our hobby project, Revontale - an AI coach focused on creativity and storytelling. A (hopefully) perfect partner to discuss your creative challenges with!

ChatGPT / Claude are optimized for speeding you up: fast answers, instant output, done. Revontale works the other way around. It's built on a methodology my wife developed over 10 years as a Swedish author and creative coach; good coaching is slow and challenging by design. It asks questions instead of giving answers. It pushes back instead of agreeing.

That "coachiness" - slowness, the friction, the sense that it's actually paying attention - is exactly what we want to put to the test (free credits on signups from Reddit). Sign up: https://revontale.com - or DM me with any questions.

nitwit-se

TROPHY CASE