watzon

Please do! I look forward to fixing any issues you find

That's fair lol. Part of the reason I made this FOSS so it's easy to audit.

There's a few things: 1. This is significantly more efficient than most other apps. It was built using Rust and GPUI, so the app itself runs in ~5MB of memory. Most other apps are built using Electron or Tauri which results in a lot more memory and CPU usage. 2. This uses different backends for different systems, with the macOS backend being built on top of WhisperKit. This further adds to the efficiency. 3. AI enhancement is supported (but not required) using APIs, but also your local Claude Code or Codex CLI. That means for a large percentage of people AI enhancement requires basically no setup. 4. I am obviously highly biased, but I think this both looks and feels better than any other open source solution I've tried. This is of course going to be up to personal preference.

There's other things I could mention, but those are the big ones in my mind. I'm building this to take on WisprFlow, so the whole goal is to do what they do, but better and FOSS.

I think this article makes a valid point. However, if AI coding is considered gambling, then being a project manager overseeing multiple developers could also be seen as a form of gambling to a certain degree. In reality, there isn't much difference between the two. AI models are non-deterministic, and humans are also non-deterministic. You could assign the same task to two different developers and end up with entirely different results.

Hi, I'm watzon. I have been working on this for a while and just realized that I hadn't posted about it on Hacker News yet.

Pindrop is a fully free and open source alternative to paid software like SuperWhisper. Unlike the alternatives like Handy and OpenWhisper, Pindrop is written using SwiftUI which gives native performance on macOS. It's also feature packed and in active development.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to afford an Apple Developer account yet, so the installation story isn't the best, but I'm working on that.

Absolutely concur. Build times are an issue, support is a problem, and I've fallen out of love with a lot of the "magic" you get from Crystal and Ruby. I'll take explicit imports over a globally shared namespace any day.

I opt for meth heads

I've been using Crystal for some 6 years now and it's still my favorite language. It definitely has issues; it's not perfect, but it really hits a good balance between being a fast language with nice features and encouraging the "joy of programming" that Matz is all about. I would love to see it gain popularity eventually.

Care to explain more? Having been using Ruby for about 8 years and Crystal for about 4, they actually have an extremely similar syntax and are also semantically very close. To the point where many Ruby scripts are completely valid Crystal, or at the very least require only a few changes.

I do think that people trying to compare Crystal to Ruby kind of miss the point though. Ruby as an interpreted language, even optimized with JIT compilation, will never match the performance you can get out of a true compiled language. By the same token, Crystal as a compiled language will never be as quick to develop with since you have to wait for your code to compile after each change.

I mean, why would it be? We train ourselves on copyrighted material all the time.