Show HN: Yoink AI – macOS AI app that edits directly in any textfield of any app
useyoink.aiHey HN, I built Yoink AI to solve my biggest frustration with AI tools: they constantly break my workflow. I was tired of copy-pasting between my apps and a chatbot just for simple edits.
Yoink AI is a macOS app that brings the AI to you. With a simple hotkey (⌘ Shift Y), it works directly inside any text field, in any app. If you can type there Yoink can write there
Key Features: - Automatically captures the context of the text field you're in, so you dont have to manually prime it
- Create custom voices trained on your own writing samples. This helps you steer the output to match your personal style and avoid generic, robotic-sounding text
- Yoink doesnt just dump text and run. It delivers suggestions as redline edits that you can accept or reject, keeping you in full control.
It's less of a chatbot and more of a collaborative writing partner that adapts to your workflow, not the other way around.
There's a free tier with 10 requests/month and we just launched a pro trial, which will get you 100 requests for the first 7 days to try it out!
I'm here to answer questions and would love to hear what you think - like all early stage start ups, feedback is always deeply appreciated
$20/mo is too much IMHO. Is this providing as much value as a ChatGPT Plus subscription? No. How about $20 one time and let me bring my own API keys? I get that MRR is so so sweet. But it's not necessary for so many things.
Sorry for the late reply! We did this in our first MVP actually, and the result was that giving more choice over model selection resulted in worse retention / usage over time
Each models have their own behaviors / use cases (we're using Gemini now), and by opening it up to everything we needed to allow users full control over the prompts (even with defaults), which increased the learning curve significantly (and the usability of other features like Voices)
Ultimately decided to go with generous (i.e. Unlimited) paid plan
Agree. A lifetime license is the only model that makes sense for a wrapper. I wouldn't even pay $5/mo.
Totally this. I already pay for ChatGPT Plus and like it. Forcing their "own" AI for another $20/month is a nonstarter.
How are you able to do this with all of Apple's restrictions? I know there's the accessibility API, but since Mojave the user needs to manually grant permission to do control each individual target app, is that what they need to do for Yoink?
Can't speak to Yoink but I built a project a year or two ago that did something similar. I used a stupid simple method - input simulation (using the fantastic enigo library). And if you want context, you can simulate select all + copy, and access via clipboard. Similar if you want to replace, etc.
https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/plock
The goal of this project was to just be able to pipe / run arbitrary commands from any text context. But, that lined up well with LLMs usage.
Sorry for the late reply! Not super familiar with HN and didn't have email notifs on :/ thought my launch here flopped completely...
We use a mix of accessibility, GUI trees, and pastebins for this!
Very clean website, i love it.
Thank you!
Just as a first initial thought, when I think of Yoink for Mac, I think of this popular tool: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yoink-better-drag-and-drop/id4...
At first I thought Yoink was making a new AI tool, not that this was a brand new thing.
Yeah we received this feedback a bunch and we thought that the underlying app was different enough.. On hindsight we should probably have named it something else..
Hey everyone, founder of Yoink here. Thanks for checking out the post! I'm really excited to hear what you think, and I'm genuinely open to all feedback the good, the bad, and the ugly.
We're really early, and all feedback is always deeply appreciated as many of you would know!
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