Writekin
fine-tune a local LLM on your own writing, on your Mac
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Hey Hacker News!I built Writekin over the past week because I was tired of AI writing that didn't sound like me, even though I had just used AI to clean it up, rather than wholesale write it.The usual fixes I found online for this were:- Some sort of SKILL.md, or- A system prompt full of rules to strip the generic AI tells (e.g. no em-dashes, none of the stock phrases, varying the sentence length, etc).While those cleaned up the surface a bit, Pangram still came back as ~100% AI written, which was frustrating, as again it was mainly taking my sloppy copy and tweaking it.So when building Writekin I took a different route: Writekin fine-tunes a local model on your own writing. It reads what you've already written (Apple Mail, iMessage, local documents, chat exports), curates it into a training corpus, and runs a QLoRA fine-tuning on-device via Apple's MLX. A Compose screen then drafts and rewrites in that voice.Everything runs on your Mac. Ingestion, training, and generation are all local. The only network calls are:(1) When you download the model weights from Hugging Face and(2) The Sparkle update check.Training on your own Mail/Messages only felt okay to ship if the end user could verify that, so the source is public — so you can read exactly what it does!Quick gut check: It's v0.9 and the output is uneven. Honestly, sometimes it nails your voice, and sometimes it's just completely off. This is more a "this is possible and kind of works" than a finished product.Would genuinely love feedback!Source: https://github.com/scouttyg/writekin
HN · launched Jul 28, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 71%) · 0 views
Niche: ai writing assistants · 186 launches, 8 in the last 7 days ▼ -64% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Content generation
- Prosumer
- AI-native
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 186 launches in ai writing assistants →
Could you build this?
Yes A Mac wrapper executing local LoRA or QLoRA fine-tuning scripts via MLX or PyTorch and serving the result via llama.cpp is standard and easily scaffolded.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: High hardware requirements for inference on lower-spec servers, Model size and RAM requirements unclear for different deployment scenarios
Feature requests: Support for model export/transfer to cheaper cloud servers for inference, Clarification on inference requirements vs training requirements
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 265 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #225 of 266 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 272 days after the earliest competitor.
- Write in your unique voice, with AI critique · hn · 2026-05-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- TongueType · hn · 2026-05-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- CyberWriter · hn · 2026-04-20 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Gemma 4 Multimodal Fine-Tuner for Apple Silicon · hn · 2026-04-07 · 235 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- threadfork · hn · 2026-07-21 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- MacWriteBuddy · ph · 2026-10-27 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- WriteNative · ph · 2026-10-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Write Like Me · ph · 2026-10-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
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