Margin Muse

Updated Essay Club HQ: Rebuilt the side panel, added a library to organize all our readings, and created a page to gather Margin Muse updates. These, along with all Club activity, are now organized into a home feed.

Slash Command Menu: Now when you're on an empty line, you see a prompt that says 'Press / for commands.' It opens a menu which lets you use your keyboard to search and navigate through all the functionality in the app. You can now use Esc to exit any panel too, which aids in the vision of operating everything without a mouse. Still need to work towards that, but this lays the foundation.

Quick Scan: Added a new tool that scores your essay on all 27 patterns in less than 1 second. The accuracy isn't yet callibrated—so don't anchor to the overall score too much—but it's helpful to see your draft's strengths and weaknesses. It also only costs 1 musing (a full report costs 200-300). You can use this as you draft to figure out which individual patterns you want specific feedback on. Also, the left tool bar was improved to cluster tools by function.

Upgraded the Brainstorm Tool: It was renamed from 'Inquiry' to 'Brainstorm' and the new header says 'Expand your draft with specific questions.' I needed to make it more clear that these are distinct mini-tools to prompt you and add material to your draft. (This is best early in your idea, as you're drafting, and need ideas for directions to take.) The brainstorm tools are grouped into ETHOS, LOGOS, and PATHOS (the same triad throughout the whole Essay Architecture system). Overall, the UX feels much cleaner: distinct cards, click to run, wait in a dedicated panel, results come in.

Better chat UX: When you open a new Chat conversation, there's a simpler screen where the input field is vertically centered, larger, white, with a header, and generally more prominent. New users won't have trouble knowing where to write text. And now the model picker explains what each model is for: Haiku for speed, Sonnet for range, Opus for depth, and Fable for synthesis.

Smoother Commenting: It’s easier to select text. Glitches are fixed, and you can use Cmd+A to grab your whole essay. After selecting “Add comment,” it autofocuses your cursor in the right field and let’s you use styling (bold, italics, underline, lists, paragraph spaces). Press Cmd+Enter to leave the comment.

Improved Customization + New Fonts: This menu was getting chaotic as a single list, so I organize them into 'setting groups' in a left bar, and then grouped related features into subgroups. It's now much easier to adjust your text, title, spacing, paragraphs, comments, and interface. New fonts were added too. You can save & name styles for different parts of your writing practice, and easily toggle between them using == and then a number. Margin Muse now comes with 5 styles: Draft, Outline, Edit, Typewriter, and Poetry.

Split screen refinement: Added some subtle changes to make this feature smoother. There's now an 'active' and 'inactive' half of the screen, which is better visualized through viewport borders, tab states, and a new icon. A bug in the picker is fixed, and it's more explicit on how to close tabs. All this works together to make it blazingly fast to get any two versions side-by-side.

Version Ribbon: After using this tool through a few revisions of my own essay, I found myself using the 'Version' modal way more than any of the other items in the nav bar ('Essays', 'AI Usage', 'Platform', 'Requests'); I collapsed all that into a 'MENU' dropdown, and then redesigned the top bar so that you can see all your versions as tabs ('v1', 'outline', 'notes', etc.). This lets you easily click between your sketches, and when you hover, you see a split-screen icon which let's you very quickly see two docs at once.

Lens labels: During my first demo, I noticed how Yehudis took in the whole UI in her first 5-10 seconds. It wasn't clear that the left lenses were clickable tools (the 'muses'). I added text labels that disappear when you type, then reappear 2s after you stop. This gave me a new idea: 'automatic focus mode.' Instead of clicking a button to hide interface elements when you want to get into a writing flow, all the bars can slide away when you type, and return on a pause.

Essay Explorer: Click 'Essays' in the navbar—or type '==E' and it opens a modal showing all your essays. There are lots of little features in here that help you organize the emerging ideas you're juggling: you can pin & tag essays, archive and search them, and set a publishing date.

Welcome Screen: Updated the welcome screen that shows the first time you open the app. When you close, it collapses into the app icon (and you can re-open by clicking it). The screen now has 8 visuals to convey the main features, and if you hover over any, you get a paragraph with more context. I like the idea of an app having hidden complexity, especially the design philosophy that informs each feature.

Updated navbar: After you sign into Margin Muse for the first time, the navigation bar on the Essay Architecture will update. You'll see all of the links shifted to the left, and on the right you'll see 'Margin Muse' and 'Essay Club.' You can still click 'Upload' to access the original app.

Public Changelog: Within our 'Requests' menu (where you pitch features), I added a changelog tab so you can see how Margin Muse updates over time. I like the idea of being transparent about this, and want these updates written in a casual style, more like dev notes for myself than marketing slogans. The hope is that by making this public, it (a) lets people know how the tool is evolving, and (b) keeps me accountable to ship with more velocity. Velocity! I announced a weekly devBlog back in April, then disappeared for months (sry), but I really picked up momentum in August. If I can ship one small feature a day (like this) and write a semi-detailed note (like this) then the weekly update takes care of itself.

Eval Engine v3: The evaluation engine is updated to include our latest control scores. It's still a small dataset (N = 3), but it started with two classics and one really bad AI-generated piece, so that we're calibrating for both the high and low end. Currently, this is scoring 90-95% accuracy, which is much higher than the last version (70-80%). But still, since the control set is so small, almost everything is an edge case. However, my new system will let me update this more frequently; I'm hoping to increase by 1-2 controls per week.

Margin Muse is live!: Today is the first public push of the new software interface for Essay Architecture, called Margin Muse. It's no longer just an analysis tool. It's a live editor, a place you write within. Throughout the process, AI feedback is formatted as comments in the margin, which is the UX we're used to with editors. This release has all the basic features: pattern scoring, chat w/ Anthropic models, a file/version manager, split screen, display customization, feature requests, dark mode, etc. What's most exciting is that the wait time for a full analysis has reduced from 30 minutes down to 5.