Introducing EasyJournal V2: An Early Glimpse at the Future of Journals

I’ve just published a very early prototype of EasyJournal V2 - it is now live and open for exploration. It’s not fully functional yet, and I'msharing it in this raw state to give you a window into what I'm building currently: a next-generation journal system that supports both traditional workflows and an AI-first approach.

EasyJournal is being designed with one clear principle in mind: you stay in control. Inspired by Andrej Karpathy’s concept of the “autonomy slider” — originally developed in the context of self-driving cars — this system allows you to decide how much you want to trust the AI. You can start with zero automation and complete manual control, or gradually slide toward giving the AI greater responsibility for your editorial workflows. The point is: you decide.

Wherever you are on that spectrum, the interface is designed to give you full visibility into what’s happening.

Whether the AI is suggesting actions, executing them, or simply stepping aside, you always get feedback and have the ability to intervene — to revise, override, or re-run things manually (or with AI help).

What's under the hood?

There’s a lot more going on than meets the eye in this prototype. One of the core innovations is an AI intent router that sits at the start of every interaction. When you enter a prompt, this router:

• Classifies the intent (is this a question? a command? something else?),
• Determines whether it needs full AI processing,
• Checks if it maps directly to a deterministic operation (i.e., skip the AI and just run it),
• Routes the request efficiently based on the above.

This gives us both speed and reliability — and over time, system admins can tune and expand these mappings to suit their needs.

I'm also exploring GUI-informed AI. The idea is simple: the system watches what you’re doing (e.g., clicking a button, selecting a submission) and feeds that context into the prompt interpreter. That makes the AI smarter, faster, and more relevant to the task at hand.

Finally, I've introduced a dynamic control layer: GUI tools that appear inside the prompt area itself. These tools are contextual — they appear when needed and disappear with the scroll of the chat history, keeping things tidy while giving you powerful, in-the-moment controls.

The below is actually the GUI from another product which I might merge into EasyJournal V2 (or integrate in a standalone way) called ChatPDF Designer (https://designer.nikau.consulting/). In this app you can see the GUI controls in the stream.

This is just the beginning.

EasyJournal V2 is still in early development, but we’re already seeing glimpses of what’s possible when AI is treated not as a bolt-on feature, but as a foundational design principle. We’re aiming to build a journal platform that’s flexible, extensible, and ready for the realities of both legacy and emerging publishing models.

I'd love for you to take a look — even in its unfinished state — and let me know what you think. Visit easyjournal.org

I’m also open to being commissioned to develop this further or to advise others building in this space. If you're working on AI-assisted publishing tools or rethinking editorial workflows, let’s talk.

More to come soon.