TL;DR

💚 Two absolute standouts: Checks and Focused Session.

💚 Checks is great because the edits are actually coherent. It just works.

💚 Focused Session is great because I’m able to measure how I’m making progress during my focus session. Beautiful.

💛 The introduction document is informative, but I found it difficult to recall what it said once I started working in my own document.

💛 Small UI “bugs” that are easily fixed e.g. no empty messages allowed.

💔 The “global” Ask Lex was frustrating. It did not (yet) add any value to the writing process.

What I would do to improve the Ask Lex experience

All discussions lie on a spectrum defined by two extremes: boring vs. unfocused. Productive discussions are in the sweet spot: just enough input that the conversation evolves naturally, but not so much that it loses direction and momentum.

Ask Lex leans too far towards the “unfocused” extreme due to the turn-based chat experience.

I much prefer the “local” Ask Lex interactions, where I must tag Lex explicitly to get a response.

But tagging to get a response is clunky when the interface is designed purely for chatting.

The demo on the right improves on the ergonomics.

• Enter sends a message, with no LLM response.
• Meta + double Enter sends a message, and calls the LLM for a response.

*demo generated by Claude Sonnet 3.5

This chat experience is much more balanced on the spectrum because control returns to the user. People know when they are uninspired and, conversely, when they are in a flow state. A writing experience that ignores that awareness feels frustrating and rigid.

Set up

• I am a writer who wants to reflect on a piece that I published last year.

Onboarding

• Really intuitive and simple. Don’t feel overwhelmed like with most onboards I experience.

• “Commands” button wasn’t blue - so I didn’t find it immediately.

• Good overview + introduction. Very transparent about where Lex will augment / help my writing process.
• How do I make a new document though?

Document writing

• As per the recommendation in the onboarding document, I pasted a year-old blog post into the document.
• My goal: see where I’ve grown / changed in my research approach.
• I asked Lex to help me with Writer’s Block.
• It gave generic advice. I felt annoyed 😠 because I was hoping for responses strictly related what I had pasted in the document.
• I then thought: “Maybe I’m not using Lex correctly.”
• I navigated back to the onboarding document.
• I felt lazy 🦥  and a little frustrated 🙄.