2025-04-16

SO… AI tools again. This morning, I am looking at Lex, an online writing tool that I was reading about last night.

I think we know how we feel about generative AI (it’s mostly crap, it’s stealing our work, and we would prefer not to be replaced by it), but I have made an argument for AI tools in the past, for medical and scientific uses etc. Well, Lex claims to be more that than the other thing. (“Claims” may be doing some heavy lifting there)

Lex is a writing assistant, designed to be used in a similar way to how programmers use AI to write code. It’s like having another writer beside you, helping with rephrasing, polishing grammar and style, and answering research questions. There’s no sense that Lex wants to push you aside and write the thing for you.

The interface is pleasingly minimal and very easy to focus on. But I don’t love that it’s browser only. It seems to me that a standalone app with offline mode and the ability to choose what gets sent off for AI queries, and when, would go a long way to helping writers to trust the software.

But if AI is here to stay, I think it’s at least worth being aware of what’s out there and what it can do.

There are some things to love about Lex that have nothing to do with AI. It’s really simple to save snapshots of a document, so you can jump back to a previous version. Even better than that, though, is the slider at the top of the document that allows you to travel back in time, incrementally, through your document to the exact point where it all went wrong, or when you deleted something you now want back. Other apps have similar features, but I’ve never seen it done this well. Focus mode is also really nice, although the interface is so minimal to start with that you barely need it.

As you’d expect, grammar and style checking are a mixture of stupid, annoying and thought-provoking. Lex claims to be able to learn your individual style and adapt to it. But six paragraphs in, I’m not yet giving it much chance to prove that. I know a lot of writers really object to tools like Grammarly on the basis that they tend to homogenise content. That’s true (and Grammarly especially is super-annoying), but these things are just tools and no one is forcing you to accept their suggestions. For me, if something makes the writing better, I’ll use it. If it doesn’t, I won’t. There have been a number of times where a grammar-assistant has, like a development exec, identified a genuine problem but offered a crappy solution. In those cases, I would rather have the problem pointed out than not.

The really interesting aspects of the tool are things I have not dug into yet. You can write a prompt for AI and then save it for use throughout the document. For example, say you’re writing a short story and you want to maintain a consistent theme, or a consistent voice for one of your characters. You can tell Lex that and save the prompt so that it runs at the touch of a button and highlights passages where it thinks you can pull things back into line. I don’t imagine this works brilliantly right out of the box, but I bet it serves a useful function in making you focus on a particular section or aspect that you may have missed.

What is apparent, and quite refreshing, about Lex, is that it seems to have been designed by someone who actually likes writing and gets what writers do. It doesn’t seem to be the work of some corporate schmo who is trying to get the arty types off the payroll. I don’t know how much I’ll use it until it gets a dedicated app (I don’t know if that’s on the roadmap), but if AI and creativity are going to become integrated (and they are) Lex, on the surface at least, seems like it’s heading in the right direction.