Was Fermat really a toolmaker?
As a person who writes a lot, I tend to stumble across applications that’d allow me to do it easier. You might’ve heard of some of those guys like Grammarly on Notion (in fact, I use both as I write this), but I believe there’s a new player on the horizon — Fermat by Batou.
Fermat was presented to me by my friend Pol Baladas back in March as a passion project that he does with a few other people, and by now, it seems to take shape and turned into something that I’d want to use to write and assist myself on a daily basis. Let’s dig into that and see what comes out:
What do we have here
Here’s what Fermat’s main screen looks like — in front of us, we’ve got the onboarding tutorial, with several tools obvious to Notion users right off. There’s a separation by blocks or “groups” down the left-hand side, sub-groups or canvases in each of those, and some extras in the left menu. In the bottom right corner is a scale meter, feedback button and what I consider the gamechanger — the Fermat’s own Toolbox.
Fermat, the Handyman
Fermat Toolbox is a community marketplace which drops templates created by the community and creators of the app themselves (you can see Pol and Gerard popping up here), which allow for all sorts of tasks to be tackled. This article is partially written with the help of an “AI-assisted writing kit”, which we’ll see in practice a bit later.
The killer feature of Fermat is the ability of the community members to create tools and get money off of that. Get that: Fermat is fully programmable so that you can do basically anything in there, and it can become a tool as long as it makes sense front- and back-end. If you’re no number-cruncher and just a simple writing guy like I am, feel free to drive off of others’ success and use their templates, either for free (as I do right now) or by paying some contribution fee to motivate people to create even more fabulous templates.
As opposed to the majority of tools that I used before to help myself write, this makes more than just facilitates comfortable work — it propels you to create something new by helping you generate ideas and come up with something new. In order to understand how exactly Fermat does that, we have to implement a crucial term: an API.
API — a powerful way to use your apps
“API stands for an application programming interface. It is a set of rules that allow software programs to interact with each other. The API defines the interface between the software programs and the operating system.”
Funnily enough, this definition is generated by an API so it might sound a little clunky. What we really talk about here is that API is a set of “yes’”, “no’s”, and “how’s” for a particular program to understand how to communicate with and use another program. Doesn’t sound that exciting, right? Well, there are some apparent use-cases that prove this position wrong: each time you see a location of something on a website that’s clickable and sends you to Google Maps, that’s a GM API in use. Similarly, with search — Google’s API is in use here. Of course, you can see the same on a number of occasions with ratings, recommendations, instructions etc.
But how to use it in writing? Well, there are at least 3 cool features that Fermat provides us with:
GPT-3
GPT-3 is an AI model that’d take a whole other article to describe, but in simple man’s terms, it understands what humans say and is able to respond to that in text in a variety of forms. What it means for a writer is that if we can somehow implement GPT into an app that we use to write, we can generate new ideas, reword texts, find new ways of saying something and even generate entirely new text for us, even though that’s kind of cheating (although I’ve already done that:(https://www.linkedin.com/posts/seandoesvc_gpt3-content-activity-6950136150149783552-autF?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web)). A few years ago it sounded like a fantasy reality for me, but now Fermat introduces GPT’s API as a part of its Toolbox, and thus we’re allowed to use it as we please. I’ll show how directly it goes in a few paragraphs.
DALL-E Mini
DALL-E is an NLP-powered app (meaning that it understands written text) that generates pictures on a high enough level so that it’s convincing. To illustrate, here’s “Futuristic house in the woods” by DALL-E:
To clarify, it’s not just a picture taken from the internet — this picture merely doesn’t exist at all. DALL-E created it. And with the help of DALL-E mini, DALL-E’s API, you can create your own illustrations that would be unique and ever-changing. Fermat has it as one of its tools, both as a solution integrated into something else or just as a plain image generator.
Twitter API
This one is cool for me personally — as seen here (https://twitter.com/polbaladas/status/1560282130919608320?s=20&t=HsODAcsdVuzTwAKlQTYcIw), Fermat can derive sentiment from tweets, which can be used in a whole number of ways. I am a bit humbled to say that, but this specific use case is partially my idea, as I mentioned in a dialogue with Pol that this feature should exist, and surely enough, he made it read! That’s what I call “responsiveness to criticism”.
A bit of practice
Let’s try and practice with our newly gained knowledge. I took it upon myself and uploaded the screen for “AI-assisted writing”, so let’s figure out what we can do here.
Here we are, sitting comfortably on our template. There’s some basic button repertoire that we can guess the usage of quite quickly. I came up with a problem I stumble upon pretty often: what to write about in tech. Let’s see what comes out of it if I ask to come up with 5 solutions for that. Also, I want bullet points because I’m a maniac.
BEWM!
It came up with ideas. Not perfect, as I expected more tech topics rather than “how to talk about the problem of writing block,” but as I get used to it more (I used GPT before), it becomes more clear how to work your inquiries clearly. Now, let’s assume that we need a picture for the article about “writing block”. You’ve got three equally fantastic choices: look for stock images, scribble a masterpiece of your own, or ask a dedicated tool to create a picture for you. To spare the fact that I’m daltonic and cannot draw a straight line even in paint, let’s go to the DALL-E tool and try it in the same workspace.
Here you go. In less than 20 clicks, we’ve got an interesting visualization for an article about a block. AI is not that good with faces, but it gives it some extra 💫pizzaz💫.
Wrapping up
While not a tool guy, I found this one to be at least fun and, at best — a really cool way to enhance your writing, allowing yourself to rely on AI when trying to come up with a new topic or piece. Aside from that, it’s always nice to feel that somebody (or something) contributes to your work, even if it’s a bunch of ones and zeroes (not to offend ones and zeroes out there). Don’t be shy, try Fermat and maybe even create your own stuff if you don’t find anything useful in their marketplace (which I don’t believe is possible — there’s a lot of stuff).
Whatever the outcome of your journey is, feel free to share in the comments how it went, and let’s build this cool new community — I don’t want to get all the fun alone; it feels selfish.
