Guide
Echo for developers, on a Mac.
The code is the easy part. It is the PR description, the issue reply and the standup note that break your focus — and those are exactly what a chat window makes worse.
· Written by the people who make Echo
The short version
Echo is not a coding assistant and does not try to be: it has no repo context and writes no code. It is the writing layer around the code. Select the notes you scrawled about a branch and get a PR description; select a stack trace and get a plain-English reading of it; tidy a README paragraph or an issue reply without leaving the editor, the terminal or the browser tab you are in. One shortcut, result in place, popup gone.
Where it lands in a working day
None of these are hard problems. They are all interruptions — which is the point.
The pull request description
You know what changed. Type it roughly, select it, and get a description with the context a reviewer needs, in the shape your team expects.
A stack trace you did not write
Select it in the terminal and ask for two sentences of plain English. Faster than pasting it into a browser and losing the terminal.
Replying to an issue in English
When English is not your first language, an issue reply can cost ten minutes and still read blunter than you meant. Clean Up fixes both.
README and doc paragraphs
The sentence you have rewritten three times becomes the one you meant, in the editor, without a docs-writing detour.
Commit messages
Rough note in, conventional message out. Works in the terminal and in whatever Git client you use.
Standups and status updates
Bullet points into something a non-engineer can read, pasted into Slack in the same motion.
Why a chat window is worse here than anywhere else
Developer work is already a stack of context: the branch, the failing test, the thing you were about to try. A chat window is another window with its own context, and every trip to it costs you the one you were holding. That is why the copy-paste round trip feels disproportionately expensive in an editor — it is not the seconds, it is the reload.
Echo never opens a window you have to come back from. The popup appears over the editor, does the one thing, and disappears. What you were holding stays held.
What it deliberately does not do
It does not read your repository. It does not run your tests, open a terminal, edit files, or know that the function you selected is called from three places. It is not an agent and it is not competing with the assistant you already use inside your editor.
That constraint is why it is fast and why it works in every app rather than a supported few. If a task needs your codebase, use the tool that has your codebase. If a task is "make these words good", it is Echo, and it is done before the other tool has finished opening.
The three you will use most
Clean Up
PR descriptions, issue replies and docs — fixed for grammar and phrasing, still in your voice.
How it worksSummarize
Long threads, RFCs and specs condensed to what you actually have to act on.
How it worksWrite as Email
Rough notes into the status update or the message to a stakeholder, properly written.
How it worksQuestions
No. Echo works on the text you selected and has no view of your repository, your build or your test suite. It is for the writing that surrounds the code — pull request descriptions, commit messages, issue replies, docs, standup notes. Keep your coding assistant for the code; they do not overlap.
Yes, and in the terminal, and on GitHub in your browser. Echo reads the selection through macOS Accessibility rather than shipping an extension per editor, so anywhere you can highlight text is somewhere it works — including apps that will never have a plugin.
Whatever you select is sent over HTTPS to Echo’s own backend to be processed, and nothing is kept or logged on our side. Treat it the way you would treat any cloud service: it is fine for a commit message or an error string, and you should not be selecting production secrets and pasting them into anything, us included.
Yes, and on this kind of work you will do it often: “rewrite as a PR description with a testing section”, “explain this stack trace in two sentences”, “make this comment shorter”. Type the instruction instead of picking a preset and Echo follows it.
Yes, wherever selection works — Terminal, iTerm, the editor’s built-in shell. Selecting a stack trace and asking for a plain-English reading of it is one of the most-used things on this list.
It can replace the selection directly, or hand you the result to paste yourself. In an editor most people prefer replace for prose (a README paragraph, a comment) and copy for anything they want to eyeball first.
Echo is free to try for 7 days, no card. Download it for macOS.