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Cotypist cotypist.app

Can AI replace Cotypist?

The idea is simple: watch what you type, predict the rest, show it as ghost text, accept with Tab. The prediction part is genuinely easy now, a small local model or even a personal n-gram table over your own writing gets you most of the way. The hard part is everything around it: reading the current text field and caret position through the macOS Accessibility API, drawing an overlay that tracks a moving cursor, and not breaking in Electron apps, Chrome, terminals, password fields, or anything that reimplements text editing. You can build something that works in native AppKit fields in a couple of long sessions and feels magic. Getting it to work everywhere, at typing latency, without eating keystrokes or leaking into your bank login, is where the actual product lives.

Verdict: Half-bot · AI gets you partway; the hard part stays hardBuild time: multi-day

Replacing a paid app means you set it up and keep it running: hosting, updates and backups can be on you. What you give up.

Half-bot

01What it costs

$6/moPlus, monthly, billed annually, 1 Mac
$72per year at that price

Checked Aug 18, 2026 · source: cotypist.app.

02Could AI build it for you?

The core job: A menu bar app that watches keystrokes via the Accessibility API, asks a local model for the next few words, and paints an inline ghost suggestion you accept with Tab.

What a working version needs:

  • macOS with Xcode and a Swift toolchain
  • Accessibility and Input Monitoring permissions granted manually
  • a small local model via llama.cpp or MLX, or a personal n-gram corpus built from your own text
  • Apple Silicon strongly preferred for latency

The prediction is the fun part and the least of your problems. Everything hard about this app is downstream of macOS not wanting you to know where the cursor is.

03What you'd give up

  • Coverage: your build will work in native text fields and fail or misbehave in Electron apps, browsers, and terminals
  • Latency polish: suggestions that arrive after you already typed the words are worse than nothing
  • Safety rails: skipping password fields, secure input mode, and sensitive apps takes deliberate work
  • Personalization that actually improves over months of your writing rather than a one-off corpus dump
  • Signed, notarized, auto-updating distribution and the permission onboarding that makes it survive OS updates

Because a text predictor that works in nine apps and glitches in the tenth is a text predictor you turn off. The value here is invisible reliability across an entire OS, which means quietly handling every app that draws its own caret, every accessibility API quirk, and every macOS release that changes the rules. That is maintenance work, not a build, and it is worth a small license fee to hand off.

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04The build prompt

Get the Build Kit for Cotypist

The complete build prompt, plus 11 step-by-step prompts from research to launch, a design system file, a page-by-page spec, the data model and a launch checklist.

Get the Build Kit · $9 →

One-time payment. Delivered on screen and by email.

Prices change; confirm on the vendor's site before you decide.