HACKER Q&A
📣 willbirr

How do you spend less time typing?


With the rise of LLMs typing speed has become a bigger bottleneck in my productivity, mostly because I type a lot into LLM chatboxes.

I can only type fast with a lot of typos, typos so bad that the edit distance between what I want to say and what I write is too big for autocomplete.

On the other hand LLMs can clean up my jumbled typing if I paste it into them, say, after every paragraph. So what I would want is something like a local LLM fine-tuned for cleaning my typo-ridden paragraphs every time I hit Enter. Maybe it could also correct some grammatical mistakes like doubled words ("e.g. "the the"). The two places I feel I would need it the most are LLM chat interfaces (I know I could have a base prompt like: "always rewrite my input without typos before answering", but it costs tokens and time) and messaging (Teams, Slack, email)

I could not find anything like this while searching online, I found these but both are based on shortcut expansion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37326870

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24753493

What do you use for faster input?

I know of the options of learning to type faster and using voice input


  👤 Alex-Programs Accepted Answer ✓
You could try a chorded keyboard. Or just learn to type faster - I know you know of it, but it really isn't that difficult. Just be wary of RSI.

I haven't seen anything like your LLM cleanup idea, but I like it. Why not implement it yourself? A MVP could take your clipboard, clean it up, then dump the cleaned result into your clipboard.

In the long term you would want to fine tune a small model, but in the short term just call openai/anthropic's smaller models with a terse prompt.


👤 solardev
Are you sure something like Grammarly wouldn't work...? A LLM seems overkill for this, and error-prone too.

Also... wouldn't it be helpful to be able to type faster, regardless? It's a skill that more than pays for itself over a lifetime/career.


👤 jrflowers
> local LLM fine-tuned for cleaning my typo-ridden paragraphs

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocorrection