DialecticAn instrument for writing and contemplation.
Ideas are born, borne, and built in dialogue.
An instrument from The Pingback.
Augmentation over productivity
A draft, open in the margin.
Useful technology presents like a superpower. I am drafting this paragraph on my smartphone, and will clean it up on a laptop later tonight. By next week, a few thousand readers, from across the globe, will have read a version of it on their screens.
Useful technology grants you options. You may choose to write back. You may not. You are never bound to use your device in the same way I have.
Mail-by-post was used to communicate across great distances; email allows us to do the same today — and created affordances the post never had.
Augmentation, not productivity, is the ultimate end of technology.
Select any text above — including your own — then choose a verb.
Prepared answers here. The real one runs on anything you write
Select a line. Call a verb. Read the label.
Answers land in the margin, anchored to the line you selected — never in your prose. Every edit is a suggestion you accept or reject.
Each answer carries a label for what kind of answer it is. The label is computed from the run itself — the sources its tools actually opened — not claimed by the model, which has no field in which to assert it.
- Grounded Every source it cited was opened by this run's own tool.
- Cited Sources given, not matched against the tool log. Unconfirmed is not untrue.
- Unsourced It searched and found nothing citable.
- Reasoned No search, by design.
A dot on each verb says how far it reaches.
The macOS app isn't hosted yet
Dialectic 0.1.0 runs today at try.dialectic.page — nothing to install, nothing saved. The macOS download, which keeps your writing as Markdown files in a folder you choose, is next.
Where does my writing actually live?
When you download it — in a folder you choose, as Markdown files any
editor can open. Dialectic keeps its own notes — threads, revisions and run receipts — beside
them in an open .dialectic/ folder. Nothing is in a proprietary format.
In the browser, nothing is saved at all.
Does anything leave my machine?
Your documents don't. When you dispatch a verb, the span you selected and the context that run needs go to your own ChatGPT/Codex subscription so it can answer. Verbs that search the web fetch from the web. Counter and Expand don't touch the network at all.
What happens if I stop using Dialectic?
You keep everything the download wrote. The files were always yours and always readable without this app. That is the point of writing to plain files rather than into a database.
Do I need an API key?
No. It uses your existing ChatGPT/Codex subscription, and there is no Dialectic account to create. Dialectic never requests, receives or stores an OpenAI key — the key is actively removed from the environment of the process it starts.
I built Dialectic because I was consuming words and ideas faster than I could interrogate them.
My best writing and sharpest thinking always came from dialoguing with reality — so I wanted an instrument that could ground, verify, and counter prose at the speed I produced it. Most tools built on these models proliferate text and affirmations, with no equivalent calibration for the human at the other end.
I think the greatest gift of machine intelligence is its capacity to augment how we know.
— Joel Adejola