AI in Grasmere

Grasmere has a few tools that use a language model. They’re built on three rules, and the rules matter more than the tools.

It’s opt-in

Nothing happens unless you ask. No document is read, summarised or sent anywhere in the background; there are no suggestions appearing as you type, and nothing is rewritten for you. Each tool runs once, when you choose it, on what you point it at, and then stops. If you never choose one, Grasmere is a Markdown editor with no AI in it at all.

It runs on your Mac

By default every tool uses Apple’s on-device model, so your documents never leave your computer. There’s no account to make and nothing to pay for. If you’d rather use Claude or ChatGPT, you can enter your own API key in Settings ▸ AI; then, and only then, the text each request needs is sent to that company, and Grasmere tells you what’s being sent before you ask. Grasmere has no server of its own.

It stays out of the way

The tools sit in the margin and the menus, not in the page. The writing is yours: the model answers questions, writes a summary you can edit, or asks questions for you to answer, but it never writes your document for you. Anything it produces is marked as such.

What the tools are

  • Ask Your Documents. Ask a question and get an answer drawn only from your own documents, with numbered citations that open the passage each one came from. See Ask Your Documents and AI.
  • Brainstorm (new in 1.1). Say what you want to write about, and the model writes Socratic questions for it: what you mean, what you’re assuming, what the evidence is, what someone who disagrees would say. They become the headings of a new document, for you to answer in your own words.
  • Ask a Follow-up Question (new in 1.1). While you write, ask for one question about the passage you’re on, and the model asks it in the margin: a tutor’s question, never a rewrite. Add it as a heading if it helps; dismiss it if not.
  • Generate Summary. A short overview of a project, written into project.md, where you can edit it.
  • Copy as Context. Copies a document and the openings of the documents it links to, to paste into whatever assistant you use. Grasmere itself sends nothing.
  • Insights. When you copy a passage from a conversation with Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, File ▸ New Insight from Clipboard saves it as a document that says where it came from and marks it unverified until you’ve checked it. A faint sparkle marks documents that quote a model.

What this adds up to

Grasmere is for people who want to do their own thinking and writing, with a tool that helps when asked. If that’s you, the AI here is a quiet assistant in the next room: you can call it in, and it leaves when you’re done. Questions? See Privacy for exactly what is sent, when, and to whom.

Don’t have Grasmere yet? Get it on the Mac App Store: a free 7-day trial, then a single purchase.