The Verb Above the Noun

"Don't make me go to the tool. Bring the tool to the text I'm already looking at."

The Context-Switch Tax

The reason a gesture beats a machine is the tax you pay to reach the machine. Using a chat-style AI to fix a paragraph means leaving what you're doing: switch to the AI app or tab, paste the text, type an instruction, wait, read, copy the result, switch back, paste, clean up. Each hop is small; together they are the whole reason the tool goes unused for a quick fix. You don't summon a heavyweight interface to fix one sentence — you just live with the sentence. Flint's bet is that removing the hops is worth more than any feature you could add to the interface, because the hops are what kill the tool for the small jobs that happen a hundred times a day.

Bring the Tool to the Text

So Flint inverts the direction. Instead of moving your text to the AI, it moves the AI to your text. The transformation happens where your cursor already is, in the app you're already in, triggered by a key you already have your hands near. The interface is a hotkey and, at most, a brief status flash. That inversion is not a UI preference; it is the product. When the cost of using a capability drops to a single strike, you use it for things you never would have bothered to switch apps for — and that changes what the capability is for.

THE MACHINE WAY            THE GESTURE WAY
------------------         ----------------
switch to AI app           select text
paste text                 strike hotkey
type instruction           (done)
wait
copy result
switch back
paste
fix formatting

8 steps, every time        1 strike, every time

The Verb Above the Noun

Flint's name carries this idea. Its predecessor was Forge — a noun, a place full of machinery. Flint is the small stone you strike to throw a spark. The whole cwk family is named on the same axis: Cinder and Ember, then Bonfire, then Rekindle, Firekeeper, and Flint — a burn cycle where the interesting name is the action, not the apparatus. Naming the app after the gesture is a promise to yourself about what the app is allowed to become. A tool named for a verb resists growing into a noun.

Remove the context switch before you add the feature. When a capability goes unused, the cause is usually friction, not a missing feature. Measure the number of app-switches, clicks, and waits between intent and result. If you can collapse that path to a single gesture, do that first — it will change usage more than any feature on the roadmap, because it changes which jobs feel worth doing at all.

Latency is a per-job decision, not a global one. A one-strike gesture only stays worth it if it's fast enough for the job. Flint doesn't pick one speed for everything — it lets each macro choose whether it needs deep context (slower, richer) or a quick local pass (fast, shallow). Track 5 makes that dial concrete; for now, notice that owning the loop is what makes tuning latency per-job even possible.

Code

A hotkey binding is the whole interface for a macro·swift

struct HotkeyBinding: Codable, Equatable {
    let keyCode: UInt32       // the physical key
    let modifiers: UInt32     // cmd / opt / ctrl / shift bitmask
}

struct FlintMacro: Codable, Identifiable {
    let id: UUID
    var name: String
    var promptTemplate: String     // contains {input}
    var hotkey: HotkeyBinding?     // the strike — optional, palette works too
    var vaultContextMode: VaultContextMode
}
// The 'interface' for a transformation is one chord. No window, no menu dive.

Exercise

Pick any AI feature you currently reach by opening a separate app or tab. Write down the exact sequence of actions from 'I want this' to 'I have the result'. Then imagine it as a single system-wide strike over your current selection. Which of the original steps disappear entirely, and which one step is doing the work of all of them?

Hint

Almost every step in the round trip exists only to move text between two places — the app-switches, the pastes, the copy-back. A single strike over the live selection deletes all the transport steps at once; the one surviving step is capture-and-replace-in-place, which is precisely the hard part the rest of the quest is about.

The Verb Above the Noun

The Context-Switch Tax

Bring the Tool to the Text

The Verb Above the Noun

Code

External links

Exercise

Progress

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