The job changed, the keyboard did not

If you work with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or any agent, most of what you type is not code anymore. It is prose: what you want, what you tried, what the constraint is, what the error said. That prose is long, and it is the same kind of sentence you would say out loud to a colleague sitting next to you.

Speaking runs at roughly 150 words a minute. Typing runs at roughly 40. A prompt that takes two minutes to type takes thirty seconds to say, and the version you say has more context in it, because saying context is cheap.

What DeftNib does with a dictated prompt

You hold a key (fn by default, or any modifier you choose), talk, and let go. The text lands in the field where your cursor is, already cleaned up:

  • Filler words and false starts are gone. "So the problem is that, what I actually think is that Redis is timing out" becomes "What I actually think is that Redis is timing out."
  • Corrections you say out loud are applied. "Move it to Friday, sorry, Thursday" keeps Thursday.
  • Technical vocabulary is spelled the way your team spells it. The app ships with a vocabulary of git, build and code terms (branch, merge, rebase, deploy, rollback, endpoint, webhook, payload), and it learns yours: the dictionary takes a word plus the ways it tends to be misheard.
  • If you speak Spanish at work, "mergear el branch a main" and "pushear el hotfix" come out as written, not as "brunch" and "pusher". Spanish is a main case, not a localization.

  • You said

    “The meeting is Friday sorry Thursday at three”

    It wrote

    The meeting is Thursday at three.

    You corrected yourself out loud and the good version is what stayed

  • You said

    “The problem is that what I actually think is that Redis is timing out”

    It wrote

    What I actually think is that Redis is timing out.

    The false start is gone, the sentence is untouched

Where it inserts, and how

DeftNib works in every text field on your Mac, and it treats a few places differently on purpose:

  • Chat panels and IDEs (Claude Code in a terminal, Cursor, VS Code, Zed, the browser): the full pipeline runs. Punctuation, corrections, vocabulary.
  • The terminal itself (Terminal, iTerm, Warp, Ghostty): the app inserts what it heard, literally, with no cleanup. A shell does not want a capital letter or a trailing period, and you should not have to fight your dictation tool to get a runnable line.
  • Snippets: a name you say expands to text you defined, byte for byte, capitals and line breaks included. A signature, a meeting link, a shell one-liner. Snippets do not pass through the pipeline, so what you saved is exactly what gets inserted.

Why not the voice mode built into the tool

Some tools now ship their own dictation. Claude Code has /voice, and it is good for what it is. It also has a shape you should know before relying on it: as of September 2026 its documentation says audio is streamed to Anthropic's servers for transcription, it needs a Claude.ai login (it is not available when you authenticate with an API key or through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud's Agent Platform or Microsoft Foundry), and it lives inside that one tool.

DeftNib is one key that works the same in Claude Code, in Cursor, in the ChatGPT app, in a GitHub comment, in Slack and in the terminal. Transcription and cleanup happen on your Mac, with the speech engine Apple ships in macOS. There is no account. And the personal dictionary you build follows you across every tool, not just one. The two ways compared, step by step.

What it costs a developer

Free up to 4,000 words a week, every feature included, no account. Pro is one payment of US$ 49 for 3 Macs, every 1.x version included. That is less than 5 months of a typical dictation subscription, and there is nothing to cancel. What the license covers.

A subscription, 3 years (US$ 12/month)
US$ 432
DeftNib Pro, once
US$ 49
You save
US$ 383

What it needs

macOS 26 or later on Apple Silicon. Apple Intelligence on for the smartest cleanup; without it, the app falls back to its rule engines and still punctuates, still applies corrections, still knows your vocabulary.

Mac with Apple Silicon and macOS 26 or later. Free up to 4,000 words a week, no account.

By downloading you agree to the Terms and the Privacy Policy.

Questions

Does it work inside a terminal-based agent like Claude Code?

Yes. The terminal is the app in front, so the text is inserted where the cursor is, in the prompt input. DeftNib runs the full pipeline there because you are writing prose, not a shell command.

Does it insert literal text in the shell?

In Terminal, iTerm, Warp and Ghostty the transcript is inserted as heard, with no cleanup, so a dictated command is not capitalized or given a period.

Can I dictate camelCase or snake_case identifiers?

Add them to the dictionary with the way you say them as an alias. Dictionary entries are inserted with the exact spelling you saved.

Does anything I dictate reach a server?

No. Your audio and your text never leave the Mac. The app makes four kinds of calls to our servers, none of them carrying voice or text; the full list is on the privacy page.