Everytype

What was wrong

A stray "TK" went out in a newsletter. The web post, the free email, and the paid email were separate copies made by hand, and readers had seen them disagree. Sign-off for one piece lived in four places and was retyped into comments.

That was the research: one question in Slack, and the answers. Then an agent counted the history of one long draft. It did not read the draft. It counted what happened to it.

One person made 537 accept or reject clicks in one hour.

All of it comes from a tool that does not know what an edit is, who has to see it, or where the words end up.

Why it took a day

I keep saying in our calls that the bottleneck is now what we can dream of. That is only true because experiments build on each other. A day is what was left to do. The first commit is on October 14. On October 15, 717 commits landed on main.

The editors had already written the spec. The plan has 101 requirements, and almost every one traces to something an editor said in Slack or to a number counted from that draft. The agent building it never had to guess what editors wanted, because they had just said it, at length.

The template did the boring half. Sign in with Every, the agent tools, deploys, and the test setup came from the same starter Frontier uses. The week before, it had become Everycut, a video editor, in three days.

The hard parts were borrowed. The sync and the editor came from Thinkroom, an earlier project, with four rules taken from the faults it and Proof, our document tool, had recorded. The first rule: Nothing ever replaces a whole document.

It stands on other experiments. Compound Writing gave it the reviewers that check a piece. KateBench gave it a copy-edit pass modeled on our editor's own edits.

One decision changed on the clock. The first plan had every edit go through one recorded lane on the server, which meant no offline editing. Minutes after the build started I changed it: The document became one that people and agents edit live at the same time, and it works offline. Every update still passes one lane, so "who changed what, when" and undo of a whole group both survive.

What it does about the complaints

537 clicks become one. Punctuation, spacing, and house style pass as one group with one yes. Anything that touches meaning, a quotation, a number, or a name goes to the writer one at a time. "Six more like this" becomes one card, and an accepted card becomes a rule for the rest of the piece.

Three copies become one piece. The web post, the free email, and the paid email are made from the same text, and "Read as" shows each before it goes out.

A "TK" cannot hide. Each one is tracked with who owes it, and an open one stops the piece at the publish check.

Sign-off lives in one place. A person quoted in a piece gets a link to their own lines and nothing else. They never see the draft.

Agents propose, people decide. An agent can read a piece, suggest edits, and ask questions. It never accepts an edit, moves a piece to the next stage, or sends anything to a person quoted. It is the same idea as in Everycut: professional tools with a person in them.

It works like Google Docs where that helps. Editing, Suggesting, and Viewing modes, margin comments, the same shortcuts. Nobody should have to learn a new way to type.