Folio Writer

AI on your terms:
the writing assistant

Most writing apps bolted on AI by piping your text to their server and billing you monthly for the privilege. For an unpublished manuscript, that's not a feature — it's a leak. Folio Writer's assistant (Premium) is built on a different premise: your words, your model, your account, and full disclosure of what leaves the machine.

Three backends, none of them ours

The assistant runs on a local model (nothing ever leaves your Mac), on Apple Intelligence (Apple's on-device and Private Cloud Compute models), or on your own API account — your key, your billing, your data agreement with the provider you chose. Folio Writer operates no AI service, stores nothing, and adds no subscription. If you never configure a backend, nothing is ever sent anywhere.

You always know what's being sent

Every task states its scope before anything goes over the wire: Rewrite sends the selected text. Synopsis and Critique send one document. Abstract and Ask send the manuscript, truncated and labeled as such. The scope line is shown in the panel up front — a writer should never have to guess how much of an unpublished manuscript just left the machine.

A colleague, not a chatbot

The assistant's standing orders are strict: reply with the requested content only — no preamble, no "Certainly!"; preserve the author's voice, terminology, and argument; and never invent citations, numbers, or results. A rewrite comes back as a reviewable diff — sentence against sentence — for you to accept or reject, exactly like a co-author's suggestion. Nothing is ever silently applied to your text.

What it's actually for

The tasks are the ones a scholar delegates, not the writing itself: tighten a paragraph you've reread too many times to see; draft a synopsis for a section's index card; produce a first-cut abstract to argue with; get a critique of a chapter before your advisor does; ask where in 40,000 words you already discussed a topic. The arguing — with Reviewer 2 especially — remains yours.

House rule worth stating: many journals now require disclosure of AI use in manuscript preparation. Whatever your policy, an assistant that works on your account, with visible scope, gives you something the chat-window workflow can't: an honest answer about what the model saw.

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