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Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

tritium.legal

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Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#51

Post by rubyfan »

I’ve been dreaming of a better contract writing tool for a while now.

I’m not a lawyer but I draft insurance contracts and work with reviewing lawyers closely. As a former software developer I miss version control, partial includes, conditional logic, etc. I am shocked at how poorly supported the business world is by the ubiquity of MS Word.

I’ve been experimenting with Typst now for some time and it has a lot of what I want in creating and versioning documents but I believe may be too technical to become integrated with existing workflows and the non-technical users engaged in the development process. Basically my experience is normal users tune out once you get outside of even basic MS Word.

I really want a great tool to exist but I’m afraid I’m an outlier and unique in my technical ability in this space. Nice to see others interested in such a tool.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#55

Post by tough »

piker wrote: post #43
tough wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

might be an issue with DPI / Retina screens on macOS? it's really more blurry than any pdf on chrome https://imgur.com/a/AElOuaA

Oh, yes, that is also a cheat code to render them quicker -- it downsamples the render to save time. That will improve in future versions as Tritium uses spare cycles to increase the resolution.

I also noticed when i opened a folder with hundreds of big pdf's it choked on it

seems you're doing work on all files when loading, you should be more like lazy-loading?

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#56

Post by piker »

piker wrote: post #43
tough wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

might be an issue with DPI / Retina screens on macOS? it's really more blurry than any pdf on chrome https://imgur.com/a/AElOuaA

Oh, yes, that is also a cheat code to render them quicker -- it downsamples the render to save time. That will improve in future versions as Tritium uses spare cycles to increase the resolution.

^ yes it does greedily ingest the PDFs to allow for instantaneous search. What it needs (and doesn't yet do) is at least multi-thread that parsing step to get a 2-4x speedup.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#57

Post by singleshot_ »

brundolf wrote: post #29
piker wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great feedback; and I do agree. The HN link goes to the app itself because we're impatient, but there is an actual landing page most visitors hit. I've gone back and forth on the UX idea, and while I do agree, it's important that Tritium selects for users that are going to be able to quickly adopt the newer concepts. Just simply presenting a "better Word" isn't really going to move the needle. It's really a shift in…

I think software people tend to underestimate the value of superficial familiarity. By all means, adhere to your new concepts and mental model. But even things like coloring, placement of the menu bar, the icons that you use, the organization of the UI, etc can go a really long way Think about programming languages- ones that introduce radical new concepts may still employ familiar syntax/naming to smooth the transit…

No attorney who is flummoxed by this UX is going to touch an AI product in any meaningful way. Making legal tools for lawyers who would otherwise be using cuneiform tablets or the dictation pool is a waste of conversation. Looking similar to the tools a seventy five year old lawyer uses is like making an F1 car that would look familiar to Jackie Stewart: yeah, it’d probably help him adapt, but not enough to be competitive with an actual car.

Dig the idea of this product, will give it a whirl tonight.

Source: attorney, former dev

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#58

Post by btown »

> There are sub-par differencing products that make `patch` look like the future.

I absolutely love https://www.draftable.com/compare - it’s an incredibly intuitive presentation of diffs from arbitrary documents, with fuzzy matching even between file types. It’s great for everything from “what did my cofounder change in this version of the deck” to “how can I quickly scan to understand how these PDF documents have evolved from a much earlier version.” Be careful with data security if uploading sensitive documents, of course. But it’s as effective a general-purpose diffing tool as one can imagine.

The real leap past this would be contextual AI extracted takeaways during the review or editing process, which begs for a specialized IDE. Makes me excited to see that this space is evolving!

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#59

Post by dr_kiszonka »

piker wrote: post #24
brundolf wrote: post #23

Feedback: the UI feels like a direct reference to VSCode, which is familiar to software developers, but not to lawyers. If you're hoping this will be adopted by lawyers, I would focus on making the UX familiar to them . Look at software that they already use, and mimic those idioms insomuch as it makes sense to do so. I would also have the base web domain link to a normal home/info page, not to the demo directly. And…

Great feedback; and I do agree. The HN link goes to the app itself because we're impatient, but there is an actual landing page most visitors hit. I've gone back and forth on the UX idea, and while I do agree, it's important that Tritium selects for users that are going to be able to quickly adopt the newer concepts. Just simply presenting a "better Word" isn't really going to move the needle. It's really a shift in…

I really like the idea. I could see some of my academic collaborators use something like this because it has features typically only supported when working with plaintext. A lot of academics do not love working with LaTeX.

But I would push back a bit against the UX and it being a "better Word". It is not immediately clear from looking at the website whether you support tracking changes. If you support editing Word documents, why aren't basic editing features, like font selection, size and weight, exposed in the UI. (I am viewing it on mobile Chrome and I might have missed it because your page doesn't support pinch to Zoom.)

You don't have to make it look like Word but it must be designed to facilitate common interaction patterns needed for working with Word documents.

(If you are building it on top of VSCode you could use its multiplayer features, which could be a good sell. )

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#60

Post by treuks »

Hey, this looks to be pretty interesting and I'm excited to see an app made with egui that doesn't look like it uses the default theme!

I have no use for this software personally but I feel like it's pretty important for me to point out the fact that in your license agreement you misspelled the name of the company as Tritium Legal Technlogies (Technl instead of Technol).

Cheers on your product. From the small showcase it seems to be extremely fast. Developers actually caring about performance brings me great joy.

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