Elenchus

Paste a text and see what in it is well argued and what isn't: a reasoning quality analyzer, not a fact-checker.

Status: maintained · public · live at elenchus.untilt.app (English and French), no account, nothing to install.

Why

The name comes from the Greek elenchos (examination, refutation), Socrates' method of inquiry. I use AI to assess the reasoning and logic of my own newsletter texts, since it hardly becomes me to use bad arguments, at least in writing; my intuition is that the closer an idea is to being true, the more it should be able to stand on good arguments. Elenchus will not tell you whether something is true or false: it tries to identify what in a discourse is well argued and what isn't. (The full story.)

What it does

Paste an article, a post or any argument, and Elenchus returns a summary, an overall reasoning grade, each flaw it found (named, quoted and explained, with a severity), and the text's strengths. The grade is computed from the flaws by a fixed rule, not picked by the model.

There are three ways in: the paste box on the site, a bookmarklet that sends the page you are reading (or the passage you selected) to the analyzer, and the Chrome extension, which has its own allowance and takes your own API key.

Limits, stated plainly.

• It judges reasoning, not facts: a tight argument on false premises scores well.
• The site runs on a free model tier, with a deliberately small daily allowance per visitor and across everyone; the numbers are on the site. Model providers may log and train on what you paste, so avoid confidential text.
• The bookmarklet is measured on Chrome only; Firefox and Safari are untested, and the install page says so.

Run locally

npm install
cp .env.example .env
npm run dev

The PUBLIC_ variables in .env.example are public by design. The placeholders are enough to build and to browse the saved examples; a live analysis needs the real keys. Tests: npm run build && npm test (build first, some tests read dist/).

Deploy

Netlify builds and deploys on every push to main, running npm run build && npm test, so a failing test stops the deploy. The site has no backend of its own: analysis comes from the elenchus-proxy Cloudflare Worker, a separate repo, behind a Cloudflare Turnstile check.

Documentation

• Architecture: the Worker, the Untilt house shell, the pages and redirects, the bookmarklet, social cards.
• Development, testing and deployment: env, the test suite, the build-time env gate, the label drift-check.
• Saved samples: how the example runs are frozen, re-run and rescored.
• CLAUDE.md: the rules an agent working here must follow.

License

All rights reserved. The fonts under public/fonts/ keep their own SIL Open Font License 1.1.

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Made with care by William.