Type My name is Wilfred and I work on opencues. make wilfred bold _ and the result is the same sentence with Wilfred bolded and every other byte untouched. The instruction names a span; OpenCues wraps exactly that span, in place, and consumes the instruction phrase. Whether the bold visibly renders depends on the editor you're in, and this page is honest about which.
The phrases that work
The styling rule fires on instructions that decorate a named span: make wilfred bold _, bold the word X _, italicize Y _, strike through W _, make X code _. The named span can sit anywhere in your input, including a sentence before the instruction. Related structure phrases (turn these into a bullet list _, make this a heading _) ride the same mechanism.
You never see the asterisks
Under the hood the model emits markdown (**Wilfred**), and the runtime always strips the markers before writing, emitting style ranges instead. So the worst case on any host is your text staying visibly plain; you never end up with literal ** clutter in a compose box.
Where bold actually renders
| Editor | Result |
|---|---|
| Gmail, plain contenteditable divs | Renders reliably: the browser's native bold command works unintercepted |
| Lexical sites (Reddit) | Depends on the site's schema: formatting-enabled sites accept, plain-text ones reject |
| ProseMirror (claude.ai, ChatGPT), Quill (LinkedIn), Draft.js (X) | Usually a silent no-op: these editors own their schema, and a plain-text composer has no bold mark to apply |
Plain <input>/<textarea> | No styling possible; text stays plain |
On Chrome, only bold, italic, and strikethrough are attempted; code, heading, and list styling are skipped there because the browser has no command for them. Managed editors can't be forced: wrapping DOM nodes directly gets reverted by the editor within a microtask, which is why the honest answer is per-editor rather than universal.
The known gap
Auto-styling, where the model picks its own spans (add bolding where appropriate _, highlight key terms _), is not implemented; the rule only fires when you name the span. The repo documents this as the one genuinely open gap in the styling pipeline, so this page won't sell it to you.
Related: OpenCues on Gmail · What is a blank? · 50 things to type · GitHub repo