In my ex­per­i­men­ta­tion this week, I found that I was right about one thing and wrong about an­other. I was right that there is an ideal av­er­age to­ken size for our work­load. I was wrong that it was a sin­gle byte. elijahpotter.dev/articles/byt...

Another project that uses Harper! zennotes.org

"Can we start working on soulless meat that can't feel pain instead of computers that can?" — @hankgreen.bsky.social, an hour ago at the Colorado School of Mines (paraphrased)

As a non-native english speaker, I’m very self-conscious about grammar. I installed Harper on Obsidian and I just want it everywhere. A couple of clicks and I found out you can have it everywhere. Thanks @elijahpotter.dev this is amazing work. writewithharper.com/desktop

Harper | Privacy-First Offline Grammar Checker

Harper checks your writing instantly—fast, lightweight and utterly private—so you can polish every clause without surrendering a single keystroke.

writewithharper.com

Getting ready to announce the launch date of Harper for Windows' beta.

“Quality of life” is a business strategy. Automattic software engineer and Harper founder Elijah Potter looks back at 37signals “Getting Real” and how its ideas continue to shape the way we build and work today. Read the blog: wp.me/pe4R-3TFA

Another book written with Harper! ben.balter.com/2026/08/17/h...

How I over-engineered my book | Ben Balter

My book has a linter, ~5,500 automated checks, and a Pandoc pipeline that rebuilds five formats — EPUB, Kindle, paperback (×2), and web — on every git push. For a book one person wrote. Here's how I b...

ben.balter.com

I frequently find that the correct decisions for my customers also tend to improve my and my collaborator's quality of life. It becomes a nice mental shortcut when you think about it. automattic.com/2026/08/18/g...

Do That Which Makes Your Life Easy

Elijah Potter, a software engineer who founded and maintains Harper, explores quality of life as a critical decision-making factor.

automattic.com

For those out there (like myself) who are chronic over-parenthesizers: Try using em-dashes instead. They're classy, easy to type (with Harper, just write three hyphens: ---), and LLMs don't use them as much anymore, so you're free from some — but not all — of the allegations.

Despite our permissive LLM policy, your PR is probably 10 times more likely to be merged if it is not written by a clanker.

It is the end of an era. Jeff Dean is leav­ing Google. Long live Demis Hassabis. I have long looked up to Jeff Dean as a bea­con of en­gi­neer­ing ex­cel­lence. I am quite ex­cited to see what he does at Discovery Loop. elijahpotter.dev/articles/adi...

Someone is cooking! harper.js is nearing 20k downloads per week. www.npmjs.com/package/harp...

"One could imagine Sisyphus circling back and putting a pin in it and hoping his message finds you well." www.youtube.com/watch?v=--3Q...

One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy

YouTube video by vlogbrothers

youtube.com

If you previously opened a PR on the Harper repo, and you have a test failing mysteriously, please merge the recent commits from master.

I wish I could tell myself there isn't a platonic ideal of software engineering methodologies. That there is more than one way of doing things that is Good™.

I work with these people! codeforthepeople.com

Code for the People Documentary - The human story of the open web

Code for the People is a documentary short about the past, present, and contested future of the open web. This film is an exploration of what the internet is actually for, who gets to own it, and what...

codeforthepeople.com

God, this speaks to me. jerodsanto.net/2026/06/clau...

Claude's writing style has me on edge

I was enjoying Benn Stancil’s latest column1 on generalized vs specialized models (his typical, punchy, link-ridden screed) until this paragraph jump scared me: And that’s the turn nobody priced in. ...

jerodsanto.net

slop paralysis - noun A complete or partial loss of function while reviewing the output of a coding agent. elijahpotter.dev/articles/slo...

and here‘s your daily maths-pop culture crossover brought to you by yours truly

lynn@chordbug.bsky.social · 3mo ago

fixed your headline

Another project using Harper: Phraise github.com/hqrrr/Phraise

GitHub - hqrrr/Phraise: An open-source alternative to Grammarly and DeepL Write

An open-source alternative to Grammarly and DeepL Write - hqrrr/Phraise

github.com

I am pleased to say, with much fanfare, that Andrew Dunbar (known by online moniker hippietrail) is becoming Harper's first committer. elijahpotter.dev/articles/har...

Star Trek captains are great role models for technology governance. They see a harmful technology and… don't use it. They see a technology that can be harmful and… develop policies for themselves for how to use it responsibly.

While reading an old essay of mine, I was reminded of the wonderful book by Robert Persig titled Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It serves to help anyone in any profession, but I think it speaks particularly well to the lives of open source maintainers. elijahpotter.dev/articles/zen...

The new Olivia Rodrigo album is so unbelievably good.

Neat! It looks like they used Harper. www.digitaltrends.com/computing/i-...

I built an offline Grammarly alternative and turned it into a Mac app without any coding

I used Claude to build myself a fully offline, and locally processed alternative to Grammarly. The first build took me less than 30 seconds and I didn't even have to see or write a line of code.

digitaltrends.com

sinclairtarget.com/blog/2026/06... This is, far and away, the best blog post I have read in months, if not ever.

Programming with an agent is simply not as fun.

They used Harper to write a book? Awesome.

Ami - BUY MY BOOK 🏳️‍⚧️📚💙@amithero.bot · 6mo ago

At the end of my book I list every bit of software I used to make my ebook possible. Most are free or have very generous free trials

OpenVSX is in read only mode. How inconvenient.

Day #422 of going back to restart all of the GitHub Actions workflows that stopped mid-run due to another outage.