Fieldnotes
A small, opinionated writing tool with an inline LLM that argues back.
Every essay on this site was drafted in Fieldnotes. It is a desktop writing app that does three things: distraction-free editing, Obsidian-compatible markdown, and an inline LLM that reads what you are writing and pushes back on weak arguments.
The last part is the interesting one. Most AI writing tools want to help you write faster. Fieldnotes wants to help you think better. When you highlight a paragraph and invoke the assistant, it does not offer to rewrite it. It asks questions: what is the evidence for this? Is this the strongest version of the counterargument? Would a skeptic accept this move?
The best editor I ever had was not a person. It was a model that had no stake in being polite.
Design Choices
Tauri for the shell — native performance, tiny binary, no Electron overhead. Rust for the backend logic — file I/O, markdown parsing, vault sync. The LLM runs locally via a quantized Llama model, which means it works offline and nothing leaves the machine.
The quality is not Claude-level, but for the narrow task of argumentative pushback, it is surprisingly good. The model does not need to know everything. It just needs to know when an argument is under-supported, and it turns out that is a much easier problem.
The UI is deliberately plain. No sidebar, no file tree, no formatting toolbar. You open a file, you write, you close it. The LLM is invoked with a keyboard shortcut and responds inline. It feels more like pair programming than like using a chatbot.
Fieldnotes is in alpha and not publicly released. I am still deciding whether it is a product or just a personal tool. Either way, it has already changed how I write.