Asterix

Edit your writing like you edit a photo.

Company we built: We built Asterix in 2021, before ChatGPT, as a writing tool that made AI feel familiar: shorten a passage like cropping a photo, clean it up with auto-adjust, or shift the tone with a filter.
Impact: Asterix explored a more direct way to work with AI, editing the writing itself instead of stopping to prompt a chatbot.
Stage: Inactive

Asterix editing controls floating above a dark desktop

During beta I watched someone drag the crop slider back and forth on a paragraph like they were resizing an image. That's when the photo metaphor stopped being a theory and became the product.

Isaac BlankensmithFounder, Head of Design

A passage selected for editing in Asterix

Asterix crop control making a passage shorter — Crop. Makes any text shorter or longer, borrowing an editing gesture everyone already knows.

How it works

Highlight text anywhere on your Mac, or dictate a rough thought, and pull it into Asterix. Crop it shorter or longer, run auto-adjust, or hover through the tone filters and watch your words change live. When it reads right, Asterix pastes the polished version back exactly where it came from.

Asterix auto-adjusting grammar and flow — **Auto-Enhance.**

Cleans up grammar and flow in one click, since most people just want the fix.

Asterix tone filters previewing changes to a passage — **Filter gallery.**

Hover across tone filters and watch your text morph instantly, a trick we borrowed from Photoshop's filter gallery so you always see the change before you commit.

Asterix applying a plain-language editing instruction — **Describe your change**

Grab text in any app, type a quick change like "make this an apology," and it replaces the original text.