copyedit is just a personal tool, built with agentic coding, in the spirit of Simon Willison. It prompts an LLM to copyedit text. At first, I wasn’t sure how well it would work, but I’ve been using it to clean up posts here for a while now. It actually works quite well.
There’s likely a plethora of ways to solve this problem (e.g. vale), but I’ve had fun putting this together.
In building it I’ve learned a few things:
- The utility of hijacking a CLI module like Willison’s llm has been immense. There’s a lot of underlying plumbing that comes in handy. At the same time, llm hasn’t clicked as a Python package for me.
- With a bit of prompting, LLMs are pretty good at keeping my general style, but there are a few mannerisms I’m going to need to add to the system prompt, for example leaving off leading ‘Is’ and ‘Its’ on fragments.
- Annoyingly, LLMs don’t seem to comprehend word wrapping, although I should actually test that out. It feels a bit heavyweight to apply AI to that task, so I should probably apply a word-wrapping post-processing step.
Speaking of vale:
Vale is an open-source, command-line tool that brings your editorial style guide to life.
And looks like there’s a good book from Pragmatic Programmers:
Write Better with Vale
Automate Your Style Guides and Lint Prose Like You Lint Code
by Brian P. Hogan
Create consistent content that gives readers confidence with Vale, the open-source prose linter that helps you enforce your style guide automatically. Use battle-tested rules based on freely available, popular style guides, apply your brand’s terms with a custom vocabulary, and integrate Vale into your text editor, Git hooks, and CI pipeline. Catch typos and inclusive-language issues before they ship, and spend your energy on shaping ideas instead of fixing copy. Whether you’re a technical writer working in a docs-as-code environment, or a software engineer who occasionally writes, you’ll ship clean, consistent copy every time.
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