For a writer, the pitch is a specific discipline: assistance that lives inside the draft, charges nothing for being ignored, and never changes a word you can't get back. OpenCues layers four tools that keep that contract, from continuous grammar up to whole-draft rewrites.
The four layers
| Layer | What it does | How you control it |
|---|---|---|
| Continuous correction | Grammar ships enabled (a clarity concern ships too, opt-in), rewriting clear errors as you pause | Fixes land dimmed; ignoring accepts, cycling reverts each one individually |
| Sentence cues | Whole-sentence register rewrites offered, never applied: the shipped one is more-formal | Cycle a sentence's alternatives in; cycle back restores yours |
| One-shot transforms | make this more formal _, make past tense _, title case _, translate to french _ | You place the _; the instruction is consumed, the rewrite is revertable |
| Word cues | Domain vocabulary alternatives on dimmed words | Navigate and cycle with Ctrl+Alt + arrows; ignore for free |
Your register, as config
The genuinely writer-shaped feature is that a rewrite concern is one markdown file. The shipped more-formal cue is a template: copy the folder, change the instruction to more concise, plainer English, active voice, or house style, and you have a custom register offered on every sentence you write, with no code. A project's .cues/ can disable any of them where they'd be wrong (a repo of intentionally informal fixture text, say).
The contract underneath
Three rules hold everywhere. Nothing is ever submitted: OpenCues edits your unsent draft, and you are always the one who presses Enter. Nothing passive rewrites without consent: sentence cues are offer-only (an early prototype that auto-applied rewrites was retired for exactly that reason). And rewrites merge against your live buffer, so words you type while the model is thinking are never overwritten. Multi-paragraph drafts carry an extra fail-safe against wholesale wipes.
Where you'd actually use it
Anywhere the supported hosts reach: Gmail for real correspondence, LinkedIn posts and comments, claude.ai and ChatGPT prompt boxes for AI-assisted drafting, and the terminal for READMEs and commit prose. The honest gap for long-form writers: Google Docs isn't supported (canvas rendering), so document-editor work means drafting in a supported surface first.
Related: Fix grammar as you type · Rewrite sentences · The inline agent · GitHub repo