Talebuddy looks different today. If you had a tab open from last week, refresh it — the change is immediate, not something you'll notice gradually over a few sessions.
Three things shipped this round: a new design across the app, a rebuilt editor, and this blog, which you're currently reading, so at least one of those is self-demonstrating.
The design
I'm not going to walk through every screen pixel by pixel. What I can tell you is what changed in practice: less chrome, fewer competing panels, more room for the actual manuscript. [TODO: specific before/after description of the old layout, since I don't want to guess at what exactly was cluttered] The goal was simple — when you open a project, you should see your writing first, not a dashboard.
Whether that's true for you depends on how you write. If you like a lot of tools visible at once, some of that is now a click away instead of always-on. That's a real tradeoff, not a hidden win.
The editor
This is the bigger one. The editor is now organized around phases: concept, draft, revision. Instead of one undifferentiated text box that tries to be everything at every stage of a book, you move through the phases explicitly, and the tool behaves differently in each.
In concept, you're not writing prose yet — you're working out premise, characters, worldbuilding, the stuff that used to live in a separate notes app or a pile of index cards. In draft, the editor gets out of the way; it's built for putting words down, not for judging them. Revision is where editorial review lives — the pass where you're rereading with a harder eye, and where AI assist is most useful, because by then you have something to react to instead of a blank page to fill.
The AI itself runs one of two ways: on-device via WebLLM, which is private and keeps everything local, or through cloud credits if you want more horsepower. Nothing about that changed with this release — I just want to be clear that the phase-based editor sits on top of the same choice you had before. You still pick.
Honestly, the old editor worked. People wrote books in it. But it asked you to hold the whole process in your head at once — is this the time to be inventing a subplot, or fixing the pacing in chapter nine — and the new one asks that question for you, based on which phase you're in.
What it doesn't do yet: [TODO: name a specific current limitation of the new editor — e.g. missing feature, phase that isn't fully built out]. I'd rather say that plainly than have you discover it on your own and wonder if it's a bug.
The blog
We didn't have one before. Now we do, and this is the first post. The plan is to use it for exactly this kind of thing — what shipped, why, and where it fell short — instead of a changelog nobody reads. If you write fiction and you're trying to decide whether Talebuddy is worth your time, this is probably a better way to find out than the marketing page.
One thing that hasn't changed and won't: the work is yours. AI in Talebuddy assists the craft — outlining a concept, reacting to a draft, flagging something in revision — it doesn't write the book for you and it doesn't own any part of what you write. That's true in the old editor and it's true in this one. The redesign changed the interface. It didn't change that.
If you're already using Talebuddy, open a project and try moving through concept, draft, and revision as distinct steps, even if you're used to writing linearly. If you're new, start in concept before you touch prose — the phase is built for exactly that, and skipping it just means you're doing concept-work inside your draft, which is what the old editor made you do anyway.