Twyne
A writer's guide to the editorial room.
Section I
Every piece worth writing needs a brief. The dossier is Twyne's way of keeping the writer honest about what they're trying to do.
Before the room opens, we ask seven questions. They are not optional flourishes — they are the spine of the editorial conversation. When you know your audience, your goal, your tone, your constraints, and what success looks like, the editors have something to grip. Without it, even the cleverest feedback is fishing in the dark.
The seven fields:
Pro tip: You can refine the dossier at any time by clicking "Refine the dossier" in the masthead. The room picks up the new brief on the next pass.
Section II
Five resident voices. Each reads with a different lens. Together they cover the ground a single editor can't.
Hunts the unstated assumption, the soft claim, the argument that quietly evades its strongest objection. When she speaks, listen — she is testing whether your draft would survive a hostile reader.
Reads for the alive paragraph — the one with a real sentence in it — and tells you to protect it. Not empty praise; specific, earned defence of what's working.
Points to where citation is owed, where evidence wants weight, where definition would clean a sentence. Think of him as the footnotes you haven't written yet.
Carries the blue pencil. Catches diction, rhythm, repetition, and any sentence that does not earn its place. He is the one who will tell you to cut your favourite line.
Reads as your stated audience would — confused here, engaged there, won over (or not) by the close. If Le Lecteur is lost, your audience is lost.
Custom editors: Visit the Room of Editors to add, edit, or rearrange your cast. Each editor needs a name, a role, and a description of their voice. The AI uses these to stay in character.
Each editor's voice is shaped by the model that reads for them. A careful, precise model makes Mme. Sceptique sharper. A warmer model makes Sœur Encourageante more generous. Go to Preferences to assign different models to different tasks — the room adapts.
Section III
The rubric reads your draft in two ways: numbers the eye can see, and judges who read like people.
The static features are deterministic — sentence length distribution, type-token ratio, citation density, paragraph shape. These never call an API and never cost a token. They give you a cold, honest picture of the draft's mechanical health.
The five judges are the same personas from the room, but now they give a single integer score from 1 to 10 and a one-line rationale. The rubric combines their scores with the static features into an overall grade (A+ through F) and a short editorial note.
Grading scale:
Interpreting the grade: Most first drafts land in the C range. That is not failure; that is the honest place where writing starts. The rubric's job is to tell you where to push.
Section IV
Threaded comments alongside the draft. Your own notes, plus the editors' voices when you ask them in.
Select any passage in the manuscript and click "Add comment" to pencil a margin note. Comments are folio-scoped — they travel with the draft, not the global state. Each comment can have replies, and you can ask any editor to weigh in by clicking "Ask an editor."
When an editor replies, their colour and voice are preserved so you know who is speaking. Strike a comment when you've addressed it; it softens into the background but stays in the archive.
Section V
Research, bibliography, and citation — the machinery behind the prose.
The Apparatus has three jobs: find sources, save them, and cite them. As you write, it detects DOIs, URLs, ISBNs, and author-year references automatically. You can also search for sources by query — the panel fetches a shortlist with title, author, publisher, and a snippet. Save what matters to your bibliography.
Bibliographies are formatted in your chosen style — MLA, APA, or Chicago. Switch at any time; the saved entries reformat instantly. Copy the whole bibliography to your clipboard with one click.
The full Apparatus is available at /apparatus. The right-panel citation tab shows a quick view of detected references.
Section VI
Twyne works out of the box. But if you want to use your own AI models, your own keys, and your own cost envelope — you can.
Step 1: Add a provider. Go to Preferences and turn on "Bring Your Own Key." Add your OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google key. For other providers (Groq, Together, Rivet), use the "OpenAI-compatible" option with your base URL.
Step 2: Pick models per feature. Not all tasks need the most expensive model. You might want Claude Sonnet for the full room convene (needs deep comprehension) and GPT-4o-mini for rubric judges (simple scoring). The per-feature grid lets you assign exactly that.
Step 3: Test the connection. Each provider card has a "Test connection" button. It sends a cheap ping and shows latency. Green means go.
Supported providers:
Important: Twyne does not fall back silently. If your key is invalid or the provider is down, you'll see an error and the app falls back to the server-side path (or local templates if the server is also unavailable). The draft is never blocked.
Section VII
Your manuscript is yours. We intend to keep it that way.
API keys: Stored only in your browser's IndexedDB. Never sent to Twyne's servers. Never logged. We can't see them, and we don't want to.
Drafts and folios: Saved locally in your browser via IndexedDB. If you sign in, they sync to your own Convex account for cross-device access. They are not shared, sold, or used to train models.
AI calls: When you BYOK, your draft text goes directly from your browser to the provider you chose (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.). Twyne's servers never see the prompt or the response. When you use the default server path, the call goes through our Convex backend, but drafts are not retained.
Published pieces: Only what you explicitly publish becomes public. Everything else stays private to your account.
Section VIII
One project. Many drafts. Each lives in its own folio.
Folios are separate documents within the same project. You might have a main draft, a scratch notes folio, and an outline. Switch between them from the left drawer. Each folio keeps its own word count, update time, and (optionally) its own layout settings.
Export your folio as Markdown, standalone HTML, plain text, or a full Twyne backup (JSON with brief, folios, and content). Use the File menu in the masthead.
Share a public reading view of any folio. Anyone with the link can read it; no one can edit it. Unpublish instantly.
Section IX
The manuscript surface now carries the structural tools of a full word processor without hiding the draft behind panels.
Type / at the start of a block to open the command menu. Use the outline to jump among headings, or drag a heading's section handle to move that section and all of its subsections in one undoable edit. Find and Replace supports whole words, case sensitivity, and regular expressions.
Tables support a dimension picker, captions, row and column tools, cell shading, alignment, borders, and reusable visual presets. Images can be dropped, pasted, or selected from disk; selecting an image reveals its alt text, caption, alignment, width, and upload status. Online images are stored with the folio, while deliberately offline work keeps an inline copy.
Inline and display equations accept LaTeX and render locally. Footnotes and endnotes can be edited beside their references, and the visible page header and footer can be edited directly in the page bands. These structures remain portable in HTML and Markdown exports.
Section X
These are the macOS labels. Windows and Linux use Ctrl wherever the list shows ⌘.