Grug Notes

had a some down time this morning due to Google Cloud outage -- Grug Notes along with a lot of the internet. Sorry!

Added a user home page to published notes.

Added full markdown export feature!

Fairly large update. Fixed a nasty caching bug that caused new prompt pages to fail. Terrible that was up for so long. Sorry!

Large update to chat. Now uses claude sonnet 4 and does longer block generations with gemini pro 2.5. Still lots to polish. But try chat on any prompt page.

Significantly optimized loading of past and future sections.

Hope to get back to more regular deploys. Development has continued, but chat/agent progress has been challenging!

small bug fix on block pages -- sometimes similar blocks wouldn't load

template error bug fix on published blocks

published/public pages now have a very basic prompt level view

small css updates and fixes on side bar

moved "last week" and "next week" sections back to the bottom of the columns. Added a dropdown allowing you to move the to other columns.

switched to noto emoji library so side bar renders consistently across platforms

very big ui update -- added a side bar. Removed the second search box (find/create). Added + buttons on home page to add new prompt/blocks. Each prompt is auto assigned an emoji now -- used throughout for headers and side bar. Added a favorite setting for each prompt, allows for additions to the side bar. 

There are a good number of incomplete features, and I'm sure some bugs. But didn't want to go too long without a deploy. Fixes coming.

noticed some layout shifting (double user/home link) and the date is not positioned right on Windows Chrome... not fixed yet. will fix tonight. **actually this seems to have been a caching issue. Went away...

we had some on and off downtime the last 24 hours -- due to ssl config related to cloudflare and google cloud run. adjustments have been made to hopefully prevent it happening in the future.

formatting improvements with how the chat toggles open

more consistent rendering of chats -- safer, more reliable handling of code, tables, etc.

smoother streaming of text in the chat. also better handling of rendering and code blocks in chat. 

oops, also some regressions -- broke the apply all button. Will fix tonight. *fixed

bug found on persistent blocks -- Quick Edit and AI/Edit still not working properly if it hasn't been updated on the current day. Not fixed yet.

slight improvements to chat feature. stop button added while streaming. some bug fixes. first iteration to fit on mobile screen.

Chat feature added to block pages. Chat uses Sonnet 3.5, agent feature uses 3.7.

Date picker added to block pages and some small ui adjustments.

Found a bug in markdown table rendering -- doesn't work with code blocks. Not fixed yet. *fixed

preliminary support for Markdown Tables -- including checkboxes in table cells.

adjustment to Quick Edit and audio AI/Edit prompts, improved reliablity.

small bug fix on persistent blocks -- Quick Edit and AI/Edit were not working unless it the block had been saved on the day.

nooo, oops I broke the subscription page. Will fix tonight. *fixed

small ui and formatting improvements around prompt page and chat feature.

fixed bug when Quick Edit fails. todo -- add notification

added placeholder explanation on quick edit, and link to chat. Needs improvement, but it's slightly better.

caching issue when attributes update fixed. Basically, when ai would find attributes, sometimes they didn't show up on the prompt page until a hard refresh. 

ok, the chat feature seems to be working! i'm sure there's still bugs, lots to go. But core concept is there. Ask it to make you a workout schedule for the month! or plan anything. It's Claude 3.7 -- state of the art model in Grug Notes! It's like [Cursor](https://www.cursor.com) in your notes!

Oof google api currently broken today, causing entity/auto tagging to break -- will fix this evening. *fixed

did some old prompt updating and migrations to newer faster llms (google flash) -- nothing critical

pretty massive deploy
    it's an mvp version of chat with notes feature. Only available through a prompt page at the bottom right currently until I get it more polished. 
    The killer feature is ability to generate notes, great for planning just about anything.
    fixed some regressions on ai parsing attributes

Shipped an MVP version of Grug AI Editor. The button is at the bottom right of blocks or use ctrl-l. The prompt needs some work, but it's still useful at times! It's stateless, not a chat. Currently identical to audio ai/edit functionality, but at some point I expect it to diverge some. 

Embedding regression bugfix from OpenAI API change last week or so. Was affecting synonyms loading at times.

Bug fix where viewing revision history would block drag/drop from working after. Probably been around a while, but just noticed!

regression fix. oops, publishing content moderation was not working

published blocks are now cached on cloudflare and serverside. Both caches are invalidated on save.

regression from yesterday with ai calls from openai api update fixed

minimum viable implementation for block publishing

bug fix where enter key wouldn't create a new line, was a regression from last week

bug fix: title saving on new blocks fixed.

started using cloudflare

Changes to tab functionality. Now it shifts line to right with cursor anywhere. Similar to Obsidian instead of VS Code or Sublime Text. I couldn't think of an instance where you need to add four spaces in the middle of text.

Shift-tab works.

Initial deploy of a macro functionality. [] typed at beginning of a line will convert to a markdown checkbox.

Return key handles markdown checkboxes like they should now.

~~i think there is one regression, space key on mobile should tab. I’ll fix that tomorrow. ~~ *fixed 30 min later*

*30 min later* quickToggle regression fixed in ios/safari


Happy New Year!

added support for markdown checkboxes. as of now, don't think i'm making it a default on the quick toggle buttons...

bug fix -- occasional rendering error when toggling between editing and rendered state (ie clicking on and off a block)

added smart wrapping and the indentation indicator (vertical gray lines) to code blocks 

added language header and copy button to code blocks!

very basic support for code blocks implemented. Use three backticks. No code highlighting or anything fancy yet. Improvements coming. 

*later today* Code highlights via prism.js added. So nice lol.

*later later* Fixed resize issue where rendered code could overflow.

another major optimization for voice activity detection. like 10x faster! In practice, this shaves off about 1/10th of a second on all voice transcriptions. :)

voice activity detection redesigned -- should be much more reliable. less false negatives and false positives. This is a big big quality improvement.

finally tested on an android phone. Some fixes deployed last week. Lower nav bar was not showing at times...

adjusted some formatting in the help page. Also made a toggle for pull to refresh, so you can't refresh accidentally while the help drawer is open on mobile. 

Significant improvements to audio and ai/edit features:
    Improved voice activity detection
    Using Gemini Flash 2.0 -- better in every way
    👉 Displays speech recognition, and spinner until it's done
    Alternations to the prompt for improved accuracy
    
👉 
Fireworks.ai added as a backup to Groq for transcription services.

Ask Grug (generative ai search) is faster, switched to Flash 1.5 from gpt4o-mini

menu and audio button positioning regression (from a few days ago) fixed

improvement in the reliability of ai/edit audio feature. Still hunting for bugs, but it's notably better.

cursor handling added while audio recording. Basically, cursor position should be maintained while using audio.

bug fix -- audio ai/edit on an empty or new unsaved block was broken

initial prototype of audio lock feature for longer recordings and of diarization (meeting aka multispeaker transcription). Unfortunately not sure how to solve the problem of ios/pwa falling asleep!!! https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=254545

Crazy speed improvement on speech to text. Switched speech to text transcription api to Groq Whisper-3-large. It falls back to OpenAI api (whisper 2) which should make everything a little more reliable with that redundancy. I tried whisper-3-large-turbo, and while faster, doesn't seem quite as accurate. 

Also added voice activity detection. Basically it should prevent the random hallucination or jibberish if you submit empty audio. VAD is shockingly tricky to get right. Not absolutely sure this is right. But testing live!

regression fix from yesterday, affected new accounts for a few hours.

small changes to ai/edit feature. added spinning indicator.

Switched ai/edit feature to Gemini Flash model. It's just faster and seems on par with 3.5 haiku. Small bug fix in that feature too where html entities would sometimes get throw in.

fixed help drawer -- it didn't scroll on desktop and sometimes it was needed.

some backend adjustments and refactoring to embeddings. Don't expect any visible changes from this. 

some very subtle improvements to search

voice ai/edit feature uses claude 3.5 haiku -- much improved!

prompt settings button, clean up -- consistently use svg. 

added mouse over hovers to most all the links lol. after 2 years.

added underscore style markdown parsing for bold and italic

improved the fetching code for csrf. Basically send the request sooner, so there is much less chance of a csrf error. 

Adjusted amount of context llm gets for natural language dates prompt. Should be an improvement in accuracy.

fixed regression, prompt settings were mistakenly hidden in a quest for optimizing loading speed. :|

some caching bugs -- too aggressive caching. Right click on entity to change type slightly more reliable, but not quite 100%.

past and future sections removed from mobile screens. I never used it. More likely to use calendar to change days.

And slight adjustment on past/future layout (nothing notable, just hoping it fixes occasional layout bug).

more prefetching on mouseovers and click on mouse down. FASTER woo

also fixed a bug where the page would sometimes scroll with the quick toggle button on a line.

fixed a rendering bug on iOS when spaces would push to the next line. seriously this one was starting to drive me insane. I hope it's all fixed lol. I will never abandon the <textarea>!

persistent prompt pages now work -- that is the block for today is copied from the previous day it was edited, the same way it does on the home page.

persistent prompts also no longer show up on any future day pages. That doesn't make sense.

added ability to "add to home" for any prompt page. Each prompt page now has it's own manifest.json that allow for this.

If you press and hold the little button to the left of the line, it'll do the same as ctrl-shift-return, ie strike through by default. Great for mobile.

Minimum viable offline support. Edits are stored in local storage and cleared once synced.

Also added a very basic service worker that caches static files. Appears to load faster for those who ‘add to home’ and use on mobile.

error fixed on similar block feature for empty blocks. Inconsequential, but feels good to make errors in the logs go away.

removed any dependencies on gpt 3.5

duplicate backlinks where the context is identical are filtered to only show one -- on the home page at least.

added title text to block settings button

polished the copy button a little more, added quick animation on click and cleaned up the code a little.

minimum viable copy button added. need improvement, but seems to work.

moved save indicator and made it fade out

stripe/subscription sync errors fixed

subscribe banner added back to free accounts. it went missing from a template upgrade regression a while back.

django 5 to 5.1 upgrade

So stoked! There's been a nagging rendering error when a name or company was tagged within a url. Basically random occasions would cause crazy overlapping text during editing. Swapped anchor tag for span during edit mode. Cross our fingers, no more weirdness. It's interesting, chrome seems to treat anchor slightly different. Safari seems to do it better.

slight adjustment and improvement to date tagging prompt.

made some changes to how manifest.json is served -- now fully loaded into memory and served static, hopefully as efficiently as possible. I think it was causing a db hit and contributing to crashing during hacker news traffic. 

csrf error fixed when on prompt page and trying to adjust block title or block settings.

super big rewrite and expansion of help/docs page. Added to menu button on computer view as well, even though it's redundant with bottom left link.