Cotypist – Smart Autocomplete Utility for Mac
Usually when I link to a new app, it’s something that I find useful personally. Cotypist is something else. It’s an AI-powered autocomplete utility for the Mac, using on-device models and processing, by developer Daniel Gräfe of Accelerated Thought. It is very well-designed, and remarkably Mac-assed (right down to where it stores its local data and AI models). It respects your privacy and all the best conventions of MacOS. Cotypist suggests a few words ahead of your insertion point at a time, and you can accept them by hitting Tab; if you want to ignore them, you just keep typing. The autocomplete suggestions appear inline, in whatever app you’re typing in, using your current font. I wasn’t even aware that was possible, but it is via MacOS’s rich accessibility APIs. Cotypist’s suggestions are eerily good. It’s even got a great name.
Personally, I can’t stand using it.
For me, it’s actually worse that the suggestions are so good, and so often on-point for what I intend to write. That’s why I can’t stand it. It’s like having a voice in my ear whispering my own thoughts before I think them. But are they my thoughts, or are they just close to my thoughts? They’re so close I can’t tell. And thus the experience of seeing these words appear before I’ve typed them feels more like a curse than a blessing, and a never-ending distraction. I’d find Cotypist far less distracting if its suggestions weren’t as good — but in that case it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting or useful, and I wouldn’t be writing about it at all.
