I also only ever used the web app, so copy+pasting as installing the app is for all intentness and purposes is installing a key logger.
Grammar works on rules, not sure why that needs an LLM, Grammarly certainly worked better for me when it was more dumb, using rules.
It's not a problem; I make the determination which option I like better, but it is funny.
Not that I think LLM is always better, but it would be interesting to compare these two approaches.
Given LISP was supposed to build "The AI" ... pretty sad than a dumb LLM is taking its place now
They must have acquired fantastic data for their Models. Especially because of the business language and professional translations which they focus on.
They keep your intended message in tact and just refine it. Like a book post editing. Grammarly and other tools force you to sound like they think is best.
DeepL shows, in my opinion, how much more useful a model trained for specific uses is.
So just like English teachers I see
Even in British I'm not sure how widely they actually use it - do they say "I've a car" and "I haven't a car"?
Has to be a bug in their rule-based system?
Using an LLM would also help make it multilingual. Both Grammarly and Harper only support English and will likely never support more than a few dozen very popular languages. LLMs could help cover a much wider range of languages.
LLMs are trained so hard to be helpful that it's really hard to contain them into other tasks
it is of course mostly very good at it, but it's very far from "trustworthy", and it tends to mirror mistakes you make.
Why would you pass a writing job to someone who isn't 100% fluent in the language and then make up for it by buying complex tools?
The Neovim configuration for the LSP looks neat: https://writewithharper.com/docs/integrations/neovim
The whole thing seems cool. Automattic should mention this on their homepage. Tools like this are the future of something.
Certainly we would never want our language to be less expressive. There’s no point to that.
And what would be the point of changing for the sake of change? Sure, we blop use the word ‘blop’ instead of the word ‘could’ without losing or gaining anything, but we’d incur the cost of changing books and schooling for … no gain.
Ah, but it’d be great to increase expressiveness, right? The thing is, as far as I am aware all human languages are about equal in terms of expressiveness. Changes don’t really move the needle.
So, what would the point of evolution be? If technology impedes it … fine.
https://tidbits.com/2025/01/30/why-grammarly-beats-apples-wr...
(George Carlin or something, quote's veracity depends on what you mean by “average.”)
I think everybody could benefit from having something like Grammarly on their computer. None of us writes perfectly, and it's always beneficial to strive for improvement.
Also, once I asked LLM to check the message. It said everything looked fine and made a copy of the message in its response with one sentence in the middle removed.
No errors detected. So this needs a lot of rule contributions to get to Grammarly level.
> In large, this is _how_ anything crawler-adjacent tends to be
It suggests
> In large, this is how _to_ anything crawler-adjacent tends to be
I'm just a bit skeptical about this quote:
> Harper takes advantage of decades of natural language research to analyze exactly how your words come together.
But it's just a rather small collection of hard-coded rules:
https://docs.rs/harper-core/latest/harper_core/linting/trait...
Where did the decades of classical NLP go? No gold-standard resources like WordNet? No statistical methods?
There's nothing wrong with this, the solution is a good pragmatic choice. It's just interesting how our collective consciousness of expansive scientific fields can be so thoroughly purged when a new paradigm arises.
LLMs have completely overshadowed ML NLP methods from 10 years ago, and they themselves replaced decades statistical NLP work, which also replaced another few decades of symbolic grammar-based NLP work.
Progress is good, but it's important not to forget all those hard-earned lessons, it can sometimes be a real superpower to be able to leverage that old toolbox in modern contexts. In many ways, we had much more advanced methods in the 60s for solving this problem than what Harper is doing here by naively reinventing the wheel.
Before our rule engine has a chance to touch the document, we run several pre-processing steps that imbue semantic meaning to the words it reads.
> LLMs have completely overshadowed ML NLP methods from 10 years ago, and they themselves replaced decades statistical NLP work, which also replaced another few decades of symbolic grammar-based NLP work.
This is a drastic oversimplification. I'll admit that transformer-based approaches are indeed quite prevalent, but I do not believe that "LLMs" in the conventional sense are "replacing" a significant fraction of NLP research.
I appreciate your skepticism and attention to detail.
1. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-word2vec/
2. https://jalammar.github.io/visualizing-neural-machine-transl...
3. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/
4. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-bert/
5. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-gpt2/
And from there it's mostly work on improving optimization (both at training and inference time), training techniques (many stages), data (quality and modality), and scale.
---
There's also state space models, but don't believe they've gone mainstream yet.
https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-...
And diffusion models - but I'm struggling to find a good resource so https://ml-gsai.github.io/LLaDA-demo/
---
All this being said- many tasks are solved very well using a linear model and tfidf. And are actually interpretable.
https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool
I generally run it in a Docker container on my local machine:
https://hub.docker.com/r/erikvl87/languagetool
I haven't messed with Harper closely but I am aware of its existence. It's nice to have options, though.
It would sure be nice if the Harper website made clear that one of the two competitors it compares itself to can also be run locally.
https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-dat...
I would suggest diving into it more because it seems like you missed how customizable it is.
I've relied on Grammarly to spellcheck all my writing for a few years (dyslexia prevents me from seeing the errors even when reading it 10 times). However, I find its increasing focus on LLMs and its insistence on rewriting sentences in more verbose ways bothers me a lot. (It removes personality and makes human-written text read like AI text.)
So I've tried out alternatives, and Harper is the closest I've found at the moment... but i still feel like grammarly does a better job at the basic word suggestion.
Really, all I wish for is a spellcheck that can use the context of the sentence to suggest words. Most ordinary dictionary spellchecks can pick the wrong word because it's syntactically closer. They may replace "though" with "thought" because I wrote "thougt" when the sentence clearly indicates "though" is correct; and I see no difference visually between any of the three words.
There are some areas where it seems like LLMs (or even SLMs) should be way more capable. For example, when I touch a word on my Kindle, I'd think Amazon would know how to pick the most relevant definition. Yet it just grabs the most common definition. For example, consider the proper definition of "toilet" in this passage: "He passed ten hours out of the twenty-four in Saville Row, either in sleeping or making his toilet."
I use grammarly briefly when it came out and liked the idea. Admittedly it has more polish than vale for people writing in google docs, &c. Still, I stick with Vale. Is there any case for moving to Harper?
[0] https://vale.sh/
It’s missing a default rule set with rules that are generally okay without being too opinionated.
Is there any reason why there is no firefox extension?
Do you have a setup where this is possible or do you copy paste between text fields? (Genuine question. I’d love to use a local LLM integrating with an LSP).
We've had some contributors have a go at adding LaTeX support in the past, but they've yet to succeed with a truly polished option. The irregularity of LaTeX makes it somewhat difficult to parse.
We accept contributions, if anyone is interested in getting us across the finish line.
> We currently only support English and its dialects British, American, Canadian, and Australian. Other languages are on the horizon, but we want our English support to be truly amazing before we diversify.
https://writewithharper.com/docs/rules
https://github.com/Automattic/harper/blob/0c04291bfec25d0e93...
"PointIsMoot" => (
["your point is mute"],
["your point is moot"],
"Did you mean `your point is moot`?",
"Typo: `moot` (meaning debatable) is correct rather than `mute`."
),That it doesn't use LLMs is its advantage, it runs in under 10ms and can be easily embedded in software and still provide useful grammar checking even if it's not exhaustive
https://writewithharper.com/docs/integrations/language-serve...
https://automattic.com/2024/11/21/automattic-welcomes-harper...
i honestly don't trust grammarly ... i mean, its essentially a keylogger.
i did try it a bit once, and i never seem to have it work that well for me. But i am multilingual so maybe thats part of my hurdle
Passes.
For reference: https://youtu.be/w-R_Rak8Tys?si=h3zFCq2kyzYNRXBI
Otherwise, it's great work. There should be an option to import/export the correction rules though.
i guess it's a nice and lightweight enhancement on top of the good old spellchecker, though
I wonder whether it will impact the performance (Firefox) and things will become noticeably slower...
Recently i noticed highlighting extensions in Firefox were slowing things down significantly, not just loading but also while scrolling up and down web pages.
Instead tell me how it compares to the built-in spellcheck in my browser/IDE/word processor/OS.
The Chrome enhanced grammar checker is still awful after decades.
Maybe the AI hype will finally fix this? I'm still surprised this wasn't the first thing they did.
If Harper does better at this I’d change in a minute.
I.e. if you write an "MISTAEK" and then you scroll the highlight follows me around the page
I tried with the following phrase -- "This should can't logic be done me." --
No errors.
Then post COVID with the increase in screen sharing video calls, I soon realised nearly every non-native English speaker from countries around the world heavily relied on it in their jobs. As I could see it installed when people share screens.
Huge market, good luck.