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Flowing is a desktop writing tool that keeps your research library in the writing loop. As you write, it highlights key terms, recalls relevant passages from your PDFs, and lets you ask, polish, and continue writing with suggestions grounded in your own papers, helping deliver better accuracy and alignment than generic AI assistants like ChatGPT. Research writing isn't just about generating fluent text. It's about staying faithful to your evidence. That's exactly what Flowing is designed for.
I'm Jim, an independent developer, and I'm really excited to finally share Flowing with you.
Over the years, I've noticed a few recurring pain points in research writing.
You know you've seen the evidence before.
You might even remember the paper—but not where the relevant paragraph, figure, or experiment is.
So you leave your editor, open PDFs, search again, and break your writing flow—sometimes only to realize you still can't find the exact passage you needed.
So I started building Flowing around one simple idea:
Keep your research library inside the writing process.
Instead of leaving your editor to search through dozens of PDFs, Flowing automatically detects high-quality keywords you're writing about and surfaces the most relevant snippet from your own paper library. You can preview the snippet thumbnail or return to the original source with one click.
Moreover, thanks to those retrieved snippets and your manuscript as context, Flowing's continuation and polishing suggestions stay much closer to your intended narrative than what you'd typically get from general-purpose AI assistants like ChatGPT. We even benchmarked this on a real chemistry PhD manuscript, where the difference became surprisingly clear. (Here is the detail if you are interested in: 📝https://flowing.works/en/blog/ai-paper-continuation-comparison)
Flowing is now publicly available. 🎉
To celebrate the launch, we're offering an Early Bird program. Join our Discord (https://discord.gg/Vqh7sKeJn4) to receive an invite code, and you'll get 2 years free, plus 50% off for life after that.
If you're already using ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for research writing, I'd genuinely love to hear how you currently keep your reference library in the loop—or whether that's still a pain point for you.
the tension-check idea in the comments below is the right instinct, and I'd push it one step further: once a suggestion gets accepted and lightly edited into the manuscript, is there any record that this sentence originated from an AI continuation grounded in source X, versus purely the researcher's own synthesis? asking because academic integrity policies are increasingly asking authors to disclose AI-assisted passages, and "draft -> check evidence -> light edit -> keep" as you described it is exactly the kind of workflow that gets fuzzy to reconstruct after the fact if someone asks "which parts did the AI actually write."
Does it support citation managers like Zotero or Mendeley out of the box?
How often do people actually accept Flowing's suggestions compared to starting from scratch?
Does it work well with really large libraries, like several thousand PDFs?
📚 I've known Jim for quite a while—we actually built Paperly, a research reading tool, together a few years ago.
One thing I've always admired is that he's stayed focused on research productivity. It's a space that genuinely benefits from continuous exploration, and Flowing feels like a natural continuation of that journey.
Rather than simply adding AI to writing, it tackles something every researcher has experienced: remembering where you've seen the evidence you need. Helping researchers write with the knowledge they've already collected is a really thoughtful direction, and I'm excited to see where Flowing goes.
Congrats on the launch! 🚀
@goodbetterbest Congrats on the Lanuch. I wish I had something like flowing during my Management days. This is really need in academics here working with word and docs is just time consuming. Can we collaborate with peers? does it support multiple projects at a time?
Would love to see a way to flag passages I'm not sure I agree with so the tool warns me when I lean on them, since right now it surfaces sources without telling me whether my own framing matches the cited claim. That kind of tension check would make it way more useful during drafting.
About Flowing on Product Hunt
“ Ground your academic writing in your own papers.”
Flowing was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 20 upvotes and 17 comments, placing #9 on the daily leaderboard. Flowing is a desktop writing tool that keeps your research library in the writing loop. As you write, it highlights key terms, recalls relevant passages from your PDFs, and lets you ask, polish, and continue writing with suggestions grounded in your own papers, helping deliver better accuracy and alignment than generic AI assistants like ChatGPT. Research writing isn't just about generating fluent text. It's about staying faithful to your evidence. That's exactly what Flowing is designed for.
Flowing was featured in Productivity (655.8k followers), Writing (59.3k followers) and Artificial Intelligence (473.3k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 262.8k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Flowing?
Flowing was hunted by Jim Lau. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Jim Lau
Hi Product Hunt! 👋
I'm Jim, an independent developer, and I'm really excited to finally share Flowing with you.
Over the years, I've noticed a few recurring pain points in research writing.
You know you've seen the evidence before.
You might even remember the paper—but not where the relevant paragraph, figure, or experiment is.
So you leave your editor, open PDFs, search again, and break your writing flow—sometimes only to realize you still can't find the exact passage you needed.
So I started building Flowing around one simple idea:
Keep your research library inside the writing process.
Instead of leaving your editor to search through dozens of PDFs, Flowing automatically detects high-quality keywords you're writing about and surfaces the most relevant snippet from your own paper library. You can preview the snippet thumbnail or return to the original source with one click.
Moreover, thanks to those retrieved snippets and your manuscript as context, Flowing's continuation and polishing suggestions stay much closer to your intended narrative than what you'd typically get from general-purpose AI assistants like ChatGPT. We even benchmarked this on a real chemistry PhD manuscript, where the difference became surprisingly clear. (Here is the detail if you are interested in: 📝https://flowing.works/en/blog/ai-paper-continuation-comparison)
Flowing is now publicly available. 🎉
To celebrate the launch, we're offering an Early Bird program. Join our Discord (https://discord.gg/Vqh7sKeJn4) to receive an invite code, and you'll get 2 years free, plus 50% off for life after that.
If you're already using ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for research writing, I'd genuinely love to hear how you currently keep your reference library in the loop—or whether that's still a pain point for you.
Thanks so much for checking out Flowing! 🙌