Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

I would much rather check my writing against grammatical rules that are hard coded in an open source program—meaning that I can change them—than ones that I imagine would be subject to prompt fiddling or worse; implicitly hard coded in a tangle of training data that the LLM would draw from.

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.

You would lose out on evolution of language.

Natural languages evolve so slowly that writing and editing rules for them is easily achievable even this way. Think years versus minutes.

Aight you win fam, I was trippin fr. You're absolutely bussin, no cap. Harvard should be taking notes.

(^^ alien language that was developed in less than a decade)

The existence of common slang which isn't used in the sort of formal writing that grammar linting tools are typically designed to promote is more of a weakness of learning grammar by a weighted model of the internet vs formal grammatical rules than a strength.

Not an insurmountable problem, ChatGPT will use "aight fam" only in context-sensitive ways and will remove it if you ask to rephrase to sound more like a professor, but RHLFing slang into predictable use is likely a bigger potential challenge than simply ensuring the word list of an open source program is sufficiently up to date to include slang whose etymology dates back to the noughties or nineties, if phrasing things in that particular vernacular is even a target for your grammar linting tool...

Huh, this is the first time I've seen "noughties" used to describe the first decade of the 2000s. Slightly amusing that it's surely pronounced like "naughties". I wonder if it'll catch on and spread.