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Elijah Potter

@elijahpotter.dev

Author of the Harper grammar checker https://elijahpotter.dev https://writewithharper.com

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23.04.2025
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Latest posts by Elijah Potter @elijahpotter.dev

Refactoring Slop There are a gazillion guides out there about the various techniques you can use to improve the quality of AI generated code. Instead, I want to talk about some more generally applicable ideas that I'v...

As an open source maintainer, I frequently both receive and create pull requests that could be labeled as slop. So my question becomes, how can I turn AI generated code from "slop" tier to "top tier"?

elijahpotter.dev/articles/ref...

24.02.2026 21:25 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Building Software that Is Good for Humans Why does so much of the software we use feel harmful?

I've been thinking a lot about why so much software feels harmful, and it got me wondering how we can build software that truly serves humans.

elijahpotter.dev/articles/bui...

#oss

11.02.2026 21:14 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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feat(ls): add support for `TeX` and derivative languages by elijah-potter Β· Pull Request #2689 Β· Automattic/harper Issues #79. Related to #2073. Description Notably, both @grantlemons and @shreyasminocha have attempted to build LaTeX parsers for Harper. The complexities of the language and the incompatible...

Harper will soon support LaTeX.

github.com/Automattic/h...

10.02.2026 22:14 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Tally - Word Counter Your favorite dark mode word counter, now with grammar checking! Count the number of characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and lines in your text instantly with Tally.

Someone new is using Harper behind-the-scenes for grammar checking. Check out Tally!

tally.johng.io/en

03.02.2026 15:40 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Harper, My New Grammar Checker For years I’ve used the popular Code Spell Checker extension for VS Code. While it’s been great for spell checking, as I write more in VS Code, especially in using Hugo for this site, I’ve wanted some...

I saw that @chriswiegman.com just blogged about writing with Harper in VS Code. Great stuff.

chriswiegman.com/2026/01/harp...

27.01.2026 19:01 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Microsoft handed the government encryption keys for customer data Microsoft complied with a warrant to hand over BitLocker recovery keys to the FBI, and privacy advocates are worried.

this is why data ownership (and sovereignty) is crucial! www.theverge.com/news/867244/...

26.01.2026 06:14 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Harper is Getting Better
Harper is Getting Better YouTube video by linkarzu

@linkarzu.bsky.social's recent video is a great primer if you spend a ton of time in @neovim.io (like I do). It's true: Harper is getting better.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=he8V...

20.01.2026 22:18 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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AI Psychosis One of the most concerning trends I've seen is that, as people adopt AI, it captures those for whom it was designed. That previous sentence went through several revisions at various layers of intelligence... the spell-checker, grammar-checker, Grammarly, Harper, maybe more, all attacking the words that spill from my divine intelligence and then interact with yours. Anthropic has published a really interesting essay and paper, …

AI Psychosis

One of the most concerning trends I've seen is that, as people adopt AI, it captures those for whom it was designed. That previous sentence went through several revisions at various layers of intelligence... the spell-checker, grammar-checker, Grammarly, Harper, maybe more, all…

20.01.2026 04:26 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

We love to see Harper getting some attention!

Open source, private, and developer-focused. Give it a try! writewithharper.com

17.01.2026 00:00 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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I stopped paying for Grammarly once I found out there's a free open-source alternative I thought Grammarly was essential. It wasn’t.

Great piece. I'm thrilled that this was the first result that popped up when I searched for "open source grammar checker".

www.makeuseof.com/stopped-payi...

16.01.2026 22:14 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1
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Harper | Privacy-First Offline Grammar Checker Harper checks your writing instantlyβ€”fast, lightweight and utterly privateβ€”so you can polish every clause without surrendering a single keystroke.

With Language Tool and Grammarly embracing AI, and somewhat questionable privacy practices to begin with, I am so thankful that Harper exists. It's everything I need and nothing I don't.

https://writewithharper.com/

#grammar #extension

13.01.2026 14:25 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Imagine a Weir Marketplace I've come to the realization that there is a high degree of specialization among academic fields. If we embrace this specialization through customization, we could gain an advantage over other grammar...

I've observed a high degree of specialization of language between academic fields. I've been thinking about how we can make Harper more helpful for the specialists.

elijahpotter.dev/articles/ima...

12.01.2026 18:41 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Harper | Privacy-First Offline Grammar Checker Harper checks your writing instantlyβ€”fast, lightweight and utterly privateβ€”so you can polish every clause without surrendering a single keystroke.

Now there's an LSP for text. Harper is a modern grammar checker, open source, and you integrate it with your Markdown editor by adding an LSP config for Markdown. One doesn't exist for Markdown on Emacs (yet), but... :-)

writewithharper.com/docs/integra...

08.01.2026 20:21 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Harper vs. Grammarly: The Productivity Upgrade No One’s Talking About - Make Tech Easier Looking for a Grammarly alternative? Find out why I choose Harper as the winner between Harper vs. Grammarly.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

www.maketecheasier.com/harper-vs-gr...

02.01.2026 19:01 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Someone Remixed Tatum A quick shout-out

Someone has taken advantage of Tatum's open-source license and remixed it into something even more capable. I highly suggest you check out penview.

elijahpotter.dev/articles/som...

#nvim #productivity #coding

01.01.2026 20:03 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Harper sounds amazing! Ellipsus doesn't have any advanced grammar checking abilities today, but it's something we would like to look into in the future.

Let's get in touch!

08.12.2025 17:18 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Projects Using Harper I just found out that some new projects are using Harper. Could yours be next?

I recently did some snooping (through Dependabot) on what open source projects have been using Harper. Since I last checked, there are some new ones.

elijahpotter.dev/articles/pro...

29.12.2025 21:38 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Generating Weir Code with LLMs Some experimentation shows that LLMs are extremely effective at understanding and generating DSL code.

I've been experimenting with using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate rules for my programming language, Weir, and I'm really excited about the potential.

elijahpotter.dev/articles/gen...

22.12.2025 20:17 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Updates on the Weir Language In [my last blog post](./building_the_weir_language), I described the why, what, and how of the Weir programming language. Before signing off for the day, I just wanted to give a few updates on the We...

I've been tweaking the keywords to make them more descriptive and less clunky – I replaced "declare" and "set" with "let" and "expr," and you can see the changes in the example code.

elijahpotter.dev/articles/upd...

18.12.2025 14:53 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Harper Can Apply Titlecase In case you didn't know: Harper can convert text to title case! This has been around for a long time, but we haven't really talked about it publicly.

I'm excited to share that Harper can now apply title case to text! It's a simple but useful feature, especially for ensuring consistency in titles like the ones on this blog.

elijahpotter.dev/articles/har...

17.12.2025 04:13 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Building the Weir Language A domain-specific language for describing patterns in natural language.

I've been tinkering with a new language for expressing grammatical rules, with the goal of making it easier for people to create and share style guides that Harper can understand.

If you all have any opinions on syntax or anything, let me know!

elijahpotter.dev/articles/bui...

16.12.2025 15:17 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Harper | Privacy-First Offline Grammar Checker Harper checks your writing instantlyβ€”fast, lightweight and utterly privateβ€”so you can polish every clause without surrendering a single keystroke.

I was looking for grammar/spell-check language servers to use in Neovim and came across Harper (writewithharper.com)

Turns out it also has extensions for Firefox/Chrome. I don't use Grammarly, but for people who do, could be a nicer, more private alternative β€” it's local-only and open-source.

14.12.2025 17:13 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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Stop Paying for Grammarly: 3 Free Alternatives in 2025 I left Grammarly, and my writing got better.

It's nice to see Harper on this list.

medium.com/macoclock/st...

15.12.2025 20:09 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

When you do, I hope you consider Harper. We've taken great care to make grammar checking as simple as possible to set up. If there's anything we can do to make it even easier for you, let me know!

Feel free to DM me.

08.12.2025 17:59 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

It seems like Harper and @ellipsus.com share a lot of core values. Perhaps we could collaborate on something?

08.12.2025 15:16 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

That's exactly why capital "Q" Quality is so much more important these days.

05.12.2025 19:18 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Harper Turns 1.0 Today Harper finally releases a `1.0.0`

Today, we published Harper's 1.0.0 release. It's a huge milestone, and I'd like to discuss why it took so long, why we're doing it now, and what's next for the project.

elijahpotter.dev/articles/har...

03.12.2025 21:11 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Our very own @ma.tt joined the TBPN crew to close out #StateOfTheWord yesterday. They talked about WordPress 6.9, open source, @beeper, and how AI is changing the web. Did you miss it? Check it out now. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBQh...

03.12.2025 19:37 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 8 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Re Collaboration Sucks Why collaboration still matters when kept intentional.

If you had shown this article to the Elijah Potter from a year ago, he would have agreed with most of what it says. I was of the strong opinion that collaboration was fundamentally counterproductive to getting sh*t done. Since then, I've completely changed my tune.

elijahpotter.dev/articles/re:...

18.11.2025 20:45 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Harper Is In Cursor And Visual Studio Code A boon if you comment your code.

Harper is in Cursor and VS Code Β· A grammar checker for your code editor Β· ilo.im/162w5w by Elijah Potter #Development #Extensions

21.03.2025 01:07 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0