Jev for writing
Last year it cost $2 and 30 minutes to run a detailed Essay Architecture analysis. Now, thanks to Jev, it costs a fraction of a cent and less than a second. Acceleration! This really makes The Best Internet Essays project scalable. Grading 1,000 essays last year would have cost me $2,000. Now it costs $2.
How is this possible? Jev isn’t a language model, but a decision model. It actually can’t write at all; it just determines probabilities over choices, rubrics, and booleans. This makes is the perfect model for exercising analysis over fixed frameworks, or scaling your judgment.
Considering cost and speed have cratered by a multiple of 100x-1000x—only decreasing accuracy from 93% to 88%—I need to do a full UX rethink. (I’ll still have my Claude analysis, which now takes only 5 minutes, and generates written feedback.)
But how does Jev change writing? Some ideas.
Inside Martin Muse I can have a “quick scan.” If you’re stuck, you can instantly see which patterns are low, and then run those through Sonnet together get feedback.
It could also have real-time suggestions. I could have pre-baked options around mode switching like, “shift to a personal story,” or “time for a banger run-on sentence” or “explain why this is relevant,” and as you type it reranks the probability of what to do next. It’s something like a HUD, or a shoulder fairy. This is weird, experimental, and can obviously mess with a writer’s psyche, for better or worse, so obviously it has to be togglable. Best case it’s something like composition bumpers, prompting you a sentence at a time.
To take this even further, Jev could be the very thing that enables AI writing to get good. It can make complex split-second decisions. LLMs do none of this. It just thinks through its vector galaxy brain for 5-500 seconds before racing through the essay in one mindless huff. With Jev, it could write one sentence at a time and then re-strategize every sentence. My sense is a Jev/Claude harness that bakes an essay for an hour might be able to produce some compelling stuff. Of course, this falls in the category of technologically interesting but existentially dubious. Do we want this?
Personally I don’t want “Jev-cooked probability guided writing” to replace the messy and organic act of writing. That is how I think and evolve. Plus it’s fun. But is there not room for a pseudo-Montaigne to crawl social media and then write essays of its own? What that not be an entertaining and exhilarating side project to run aside a hand-rolled essay practice?