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Imagine a cover band that technically knows every song ever written but only has one arrangement. The melody consists of the same set of chords. The guitarist plays the same solo whether they are covering “Landslide” or “Party in the U.S.A.” By the fourth song, you are tired, and more than a little angry.

That’s what reading raw AI writing can feel like. The first few items you read, nothing trips your alarm—it’s just competent, if somewhat boring, writing. Then you keep seeing the same moves again and again: the patterns of three, the “not X, but Y,” the short sentence hanging off the back end of the paragraph that exists to do nothing but tell you that what you just read “matters.” Eventually you stop absorbing what the words are trying to communicate.

I’ve said before that it feels like model progress on writing at the major labs has stalled. Maybe no one model can be all things to all people, or maybe OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have bigger, more lucrative fish to fry in the coding space. On the one hand, fair enough. But as an AI-pilled writer, I can’t help feeling a little left out. It reminds me of high school, when the AP English paper deadline got pushed back after I’d already written it, because obviously the AP Physics exam took precedence.

So when I heard about a new, writing-focused model, I immediately queued it up for a Vibe Check.