3 ms·
Show HN: Turn everything you read into things you write
Sidelong is a writing app that comes built with your entire knowledge library attached. You save anything you read, watch, or listen to: articles, YouTube videos, podcasts, tweets, Kindle highlights, newsletters, etc. It summarizes everything, pulls out the key points, and makes it searchable. Then, while you type, it surfaces anything relevant to what you're writing, while you're writing. There's also a chat that answers from what you've saved.
It doesn't write for you. You can ask it to research something or to tear a draft apart, but it won't produce prose. I think AI-written blog and newsletter posts are still pretty bad and didn't want to make a machine for more of them.
When a piece is done you can export to Substack or Beehiiv, publish to a hosted blog it gives you, send it as a newsletter, or post it directly to X and LinkedIn as a thread.
Gaps: the Chrome extension is still in store review as I write this, no mobile app, not local-first. Feedback I'd use: whether the retrieval feels good, and what you save from that it doesn't handle yet.
- altmanaltman 2mo agoAs someone who regularly writes and publishes things, basically your core target audience, I don't really the point of using this? If I am reaearching an article, I don't want that research to follow me for all articles. I do not want an AI to "brainstorm or research" because it usually does not do good brainstorming or research no matter how rich the context you feed it (in the sense that brainstorming is a creative process). I already publish on my website and a little on substack, why will I add another platform to my workflow to only complciate it further? Yes, AI generated writing is bad. But AI brainstormed ideas are terrible also and AI research can also return false information. Why are you okay with the latter if the former bothers you? Because someone hand writing a draft they got from an LLM is just as bad as letting a model write for you imo.
- whatcha 2mo ago[flagged]