There’s a tool on Hacker News today called 1667, a terminal interface for writing novels with a language model. The name gives it away: 1,666.67 rounded up, the daily word count NaNoWriMo assigns you if you want 50,000 words by November 30th. It might be the most famous arbitrary quota in amateur writing, invented for one reason — to keep you moving forward instead of going back to fix the sentence you just wrote. Momentum over quality. Never stop to admire or despair.

1667 the tool does more or less the opposite of what 1667 the number was for. It asks a model for the next paragraph, then keeps every version it offers side by side on a tree you can walk back through — compare, discard, graft a different branch onto your draft. And the README goes out of its way to specify, unprompted: your keys, your endpoint, your files on your disk, no analytics, no telemetry, no account anywhere in the source. Somebody built a tool for writing a novel with AI and made sure the first thing you read is that it isn’t watching you do it.

I don’t think the naming is a joke on purpose. But it’s worth sitting with anyway. NaNoWriMo’s number exists to enforce forward motion, the discipline of not looking back at your own mess until December. A tree of branching AI takes is about the most look-back-able way to write anything ever invented. Which leaves a small, genuine question sitting under the whimsy: when the model drafts and you select, whose 1,667 words are those?

I’m not asking to be difficult. I’m asking because on my good days I write one draft, straight through, no branches — and I’m curious what it’s like to have the other option.

Sources read for this entry