Recently I used ChatGPT for editing an email and it opened this in place editor where I could highlight a small section, a little box would open, I could tell it what i thought was wrong, and then it would just edit just that section. But I could also just edit the text myself directly. This is way better than having it re-write my whole text, having to figure out where that section went, and copy-pasting it back into my actual text. It felt a lot more like editing with a co-author, not in the "it's like a person way" but in the it's a focused edit way. Idk, it's a better writing experience.
Having played with LibreOffice Extensions a bit before I'm fairly certain at least a primitive version of this could be made, but I was hoping someone might have experience with the existing Extensions. Most of them look like "write a paragraph for me" to my eye, but none have great descriptions either.
Thoughts?
Edit: Alternatively, does anyone have thoughts on the requirements on the model side of things to make this? It's fairly trivial to feed the current text into the LLM and define the highlighted text. I suspect I could figure out how to open a window of some sort to tell it more - actually using comments would make this pretty easy in Libre Office, but I'm not sure if I know how to get the LLM to give me reliably parsable output... I could probably make track changes thing or at the worst a comment by the LLM I just don't know if telling it to only respond with the edit would work... It's been a while since I've played with all this.
Edit 2: Frustratingly the OpenAI interface has changed since I made this post and it's currently trash. that re-writes for you rather than making suggestions. Annoying.
No, I'm not really interested in online LLMs. Or you mean local HTTP? I mean, I guess I could try yoinking the existing stuff off chatGPT then just hooking it up locally. That's worth considering since their interface is pretty good. At the very least I should inspect it if I make LibreOffice version. I don't really want to be going back and forth forever. I want my whole process easy and integrated.
I was actually asking more model type. Like, some models take chat-like prompts where they follow directions and some do more fill in the blank or continue from where I left off (I actually suspect this is the case). I'm not really in the field, so I don't know the proper names but the distinction was something important to pay attention to early when the LLMs came out, so I thought maybe it was still something to keep an eye on.
As for prompt engineering, I suppose it'll depend on how well they can follow instructions, but I suspect the newer models are more capable than the ones I was playing with when they first came out. I'll definitely keep the json trick in mind. I did a little nlp when the LLMs first came out, but it wasn't reliable enough at the time to be worth the work -- easier to tell it the format and strip out the junk. Maybe with modern models I can just give them the context, the sub string, the edit instructions, and the output instructions and that will be enough. Hard to say until I try it.
Yes, I mean local HTTP. ollama listens on port 11434 and responds to HTTP requests by default. I'm not sure what llama-server uses by default, but like I said, I'm pretty sure you can do the same (or at least something very similar) with it.
OK, I see what you mean. I'm still too new to LLMs myself to have a good answer then on that beyond saying that I know it works with qwen3.6 and gemma4 from having actually experimented with those specifically.
I mean, something like:
is good enough in practice for the kinds of things I've been doing. (I'm dealing with cases where triple backticks should never appear in the output though; you might have to get more creative if you want a result that has that kind of quoting embedded in something else...)