Spell checking with Claude

I was listening to an interview of Simon Willison just now, who mentioned that spellcheck is something that used to be really bad, but was now great with LLMs.

I'd noticed the same thing when I started this blog (that it was bad) and hadn't tried again.

Hearing this made me think I should - a point Simon made in the same talk - keep trying the things that didn't work a few months ago!.

So I asked Claude Code to spell check all my posts and it found 14 mistakes across 7 of the 27 posts. Oops. Then I asked it to check for grammar issues and it found another 13 across 8 posts. Ooooops. It fixed them all, including updating the RSS feed to match.

Interestingly, not all the spelling mistakes were present in the RSS! I use Claude to generate the RSS file completely, so it seems like it had been silently fixing them when it copied the content over. It was just a subset though, so I presume this is something that it only started doing more recently - perhaps the model is trained to know its own new capabilities and implements them?

I never really liked tools like Grammarly. I don't even know why - I think some combo of sending every word to a server I didn't trust - how ironic now given what I am describing here - and probably some vague sense of arrogance that I didn't need it.

I also always thought writing improved a lot through the slow process of reading and re-reading and improving it. Just fixing a typo or awkward word often becomes refining a sentence, a paragraph, or chopping out some unnecessary section altogether. Which does make me wonder if doing what I did here is a good idea or not. I don't think I'll use it heavily when making new posts. Just a final step. I am not here to churn out content, obviously. There's no ads and I don't think anyone reads it anyway, so speed or volume are not my objectives, just having fun. But to do a quick tidy-up of obviously silly spelling mistakes that I clearly leave a lot of, or to backfill fixing old posts like this, it's super handy.

Coda: there were six more mistakes in this post when I was finished writing it ... lol.