I left my job at the end of 2020 to start a company, and managed to give myself a flair-up of RSI in the first month 😅. I switched to voice coding with Talon voice, a phenomenal platform for building voice-enabled interfaces.

However, the existing interfaces built with Talon struggled to get me beyond 75% of my previous productivity. It occurred to me that these tools were adapting voice coding to an ecosystem designed for keyboard and mouse, rather than adapting the tools themselves to a new coding paradigm. I was reminded of the following quote:

"Requiring one medium to imitate the other inevitably pits strengths of the old medium against weaknesses of the new. ... Perhaps a brief analogy could get us moving in the right direction. It is customary for a person with a broken leg to use crutches, but how odd it would be if they continued to use the crutches after their leg was restored to its natural condition. In contrast, one wears shoes because they provide certain advantages over our natural barefoot condition. Special purpose shoes, such as running shoes, are designed to enhance our best performance. Now crutches and shoes are both tools of a sort, but there is a difference. The crutch is designed specifically to make the best of a bad situation—to let someone hobble around until they are back in shape. On the other hand, shoes are to correct some of the problems of our natural condition, and, in the case of athletic shoes, to enhance our performance."

- Hollan, Jim, and Scott Stornetta. "Beyond being there." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. 1992.

I decided to apply my background in programming language theory and human-computer interaction to design voice coding tools like Cursorless that enable us to write code faster by voice than we ever could by keyboard. Today, Cursorless Talon users are easily meeting and exceeding keyboard speeds by voice.

And that's just the beginning. Cursorless will become a spoken programming language enabling large-scale, structurally aware voice-controlled code generation and refactoring.

The Cursorless code base is completely open source, and I have no intention of limiting Cursorless in any way, because I want to bring the joy of software development to anyone with a voice.

Which is where you come in, dear Sponsor. I am working full time on open-source voice coding software without pay, but I cannot afford to do so indefinitely. If you want to keep the future of voice coding free, open, and inclusive, and you can afford to help, I would be incredibly grateful for any contributions.

How much should you give?

Please consider contributing 10% of whatever productivity gains you get from using Cursorless. For example, if you earn $100k salary, spend 40% of your time coding, and Cursorless makes you 30% faster, then you might give 40% x 30% x 10% x $100k = $100 / month.