Press Kit
Rewrite beta · updated July 2026
One-liner: Double-tap Option in any Mac app and your sentence comes back clearer — names, emails, and numbers never leave your Mac.
Short description
Rewrite is a macOS menu-bar app that cleans up what you're typing, in place, in any app. Double-tap ⌥ and your draft comes back clearer in your own voice; double-tap ⌃ on a message you received and it drafts the reply. Sensitive details are pseudonymized on-device before any text reaches the AI. Free while in beta.
Long description
Most people rewrite their own Slack messages and emails two or three times before sending — or round-trip them through a chatbot tab. Rewrite removes the loop: you write the messy version wherever you already are (Mail, Slack, Notion, a web form), double-tap the Option key, and the clear version replaces it at your caret. It makes the smallest edit that fixes the sentence rather than regenerating it in a chatbot voice, so the result still reads like you. A second gesture, double-tap Control on a highlighted message, drafts a reply for you to review and send.
What sets Rewrite apart is its privacy architecture. Before anything is sent to a model, names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other identifiers are detected on-device (pattern matching plus local machine learning) and swapped for placeholders like [[NAME_1]]. The pseudonymized text goes directly from your Mac to the AI account you already have — ChatGPT or Claude — and the real details are restored locally in the result. Rewrite operates no content servers and never sees what you write; a "What the AI sees" tab in the app shows the exact payload of every request. It's a native Swift app, signed and Apple-notarized, distributed as a direct download.
Fact sheet
| Name | Rewrite |
| Developer | Alec Chen — solo developer |
| Platform | macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later, Apple Silicon (M1+) |
| Price | Free while in beta — no account, no card, nothing converts automatically |
| Distribution | Direct download (signed & Apple-notarized DMG) — rewriteapp.io/download. Not on the Mac App Store: the Accessibility/Input Monitoring permissions it needs preclude sandboxing. |
| AI backend | The user's own signed-in ChatGPT or Claude account. Rewrite has no content servers. |
| Stack | Native Swift menu-bar app |
| Current version | See release notes |
| Contact | support@collectivetheory.com |
Images
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Questions journalists ask
- Which AI does it use? The reviewer's/user's own signed-in ChatGPT or Claude account. Requests go from the Mac directly to that provider — Rewrite never proxies or logs them.
- What exactly leaves the machine? The invoked text with identifiers (names, emails, phone/card numbers, SSNs, URLs, IPs, filenames) replaced by placeholders on-device. The placeholder↔real-value map never leaves the Mac. The rewrite itself does run on a cloud model — Rewrite does not claim to be a local LLM.
- Why Accessibility and Input Monitoring permissions? That's how it reads the field you invoke it in and detects the double-tap — read at the moment of invocation only; no background keystroke logging, no history. Details in the privacy policy.
- How is this different from Apple's Writing Tools? Rewrite is one gesture at the caret, works in any app with a text field, takes instructions, preserves the writer's voice, and pseudonymizes before the model — Writing Tools live behind a menu, work where Apple supports them, and rewrite in a generic register.
- Review copies? The beta is free and open — download it directly, no account needed. For a walkthrough of the pseudonymization internals, email any time.
Contact
Alec Chen · support@collectivetheory.com — happy to answer technical questions about the on-device pseudonymization design.