Why I made warrantd

The frustration

From 2015 to 2017, I was in a graduate program at Yale Divinity School. Most of my time was spent writing research papers. The tools I had were Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and whatever I could find at the library.

My workflow looked like this: hunt down books in the stacks, manually type out the passages I wanted to quote, paste them into a separate Word document, and then try to keep everything in line as I wrote. It was tedious, but it was the process everyone used, so I didn't question it much.

The bigger problem was structural. I would start a paper with a thesis, commit to it, and then dive into the research. More than a few times, I found out halfway through that my thesis didn't hold up. The sources were telling a different story than the one I set out to tell. So I'd pivot, restructure, and essentially start over with a deadline bearing down on me. There was no way to stress-test my argument before I was already deep into the writing.

What was missing

What I really wanted was an advisor in my pocket. Not someone to write for me, but someone to think with. A way to talk out my ideas, map my argument visually, and test it against my sources before I committed dozens of hours to a draft that might not hold together.

Word processors are great at formatting text. They are not great at helping you think. They treat your writing as a flat sequence of paragraphs, but arguments have structure. There's a thesis. There are claims that support it. There's evidence behind those claims. And sometimes there are counter-arguments that complicate the picture. None of that structure is visible in a Word document. It all lives in your head, and when it gets complicated, things start to slip.

I needed a way to see the logic beneath my prose. To check whether each claim actually had evidence behind it. To notice when my argument was drifting before I was 4,000 words in and too committed to change course.

Deciding to build it

Years later, I decided to write a book. A long-form nonfiction project, the kind of thing that requires months of research, careful sourcing, and an argument that holds together across chapters instead of pages. I immediately ran into the same problems I had in grad school. Where do I keep my sources? How do I know my argument is clean? How do I make sure everything connects?

I tried ChatGPT, hoping it could fill the gap. It was useful for bouncing ideas around, but it kept wanting to rewrite things for me. And that was tempting. Too tempting. Letting an AI rewrite your prose is easy, but it takes the soul out of the work. The whole point of writing a book is that it's yours. Your voice, your argument, your thinking. I didn't want a ghostwriter. I wanted a thinking partner.

So I built one.

A thinking tool, not a writing assistant

That's what warrantd is. It's the advisor in your pocket that helps you think through your argument, check your sources, and reduce as much friction as possible so you can focus on the writing itself.

You write in warrantd. But next to your writing, you can see your argument mapped out: your thesis, your claims, the evidence backing each one. You can link your prose to that structure, so when you select a claim, the sentences that support it light up in your draft. You can ask the AI to evaluate whether your sources actually support what you're saying, or to find new sources that might strengthen a weak point. It never writes for you. It helps you think.

This distinction matters. There are plenty of AI writing tools that will generate paragraphs on command. That's not what serious writers need. What serious writers need is clarity about their own argument and confidence that their evidence holds up. That's a different problem, and it requires a different kind of tool.

Where this is going

We're just getting started. warrantd is live, and I'm using it every day on my own writing. I'm dedicated to making this the best tool for academics, researchers, journalists, and nonfiction writers. People who argue with evidence and care about getting it right.

If that sounds like you, I'd love for you to try it. And if you have thoughts on what would make it better, I want to hear them. This is a tool built by a writer for writers, and it's going to keep getting better.