I'm a simple person: I see new a writing model, I test that new writing model. My initial read on Echo is that it's in a similar place to ChatGPT when I was having it write sonnets about poop in late 2022: mostly cute party tricks (LLM explainer in the style of Ecclesiastes! Emily Dickinson explains the taste of coffee!), not quite ready for primetime as a model for heavy-duty writing. It struggles in similar places that models from the frontier labs struggle: continuity of ideas from point to point, theory of mind for the reader, and judgment about what context the reader needs in order to be able to track the progression of an argument. There are flashes I quite like - it called my Career Coach folder a "special snowflake" in my setup, which is language I genuinely might have reached for myself. And I may lift the last sentence from this example for the draft I'm pulling together. But the moves from idea to idea are abrupt. It feels like it's dutifully checking off points on the outline I gave it rather than shaping those points into a cohesive whole. And I can't shake the sense that it's mimicking me rather than embodying my perspective - which may, to be fair, just be the uncanny bargain we make when we let models draft on our behalf. I'm *thrilled* to see new labs putting effort into training models for writing. I think they have a good shot at solving specific challenges models face with this specific kind of work that the frontier labs can't solve when they need their models to be all things for all people. Looking forward to tracking the progress of Echo, Deft, and whichever other models come along for this purpose. If you've got one you want me to check out, you know where to find me!