Three things happen to an idea.
No modes to pick. It moves between developing your idea and attacking it without announcing which one it is doing.
Keep scrollingPropose something and most models start drafting. Kerfd does the arithmetic first, in the units of your own field, and names the number that is going to stop you. This is the actual window, playing one turn at the speed you scroll.
I want to test whether spaced practice beats cramming on long-term retention. Forty students per group, one semester, the final exam as the measure.
Start with the enrolment, not the intervention. The spacing effect on delayed tests runs near d = 0.35 in classroom studies. Detecting that across two groups, at the usual threshold, needs about 130 students per group. Forty gives you roughly 35% power.
So the study is likelier to miss the effect than to find it, and a null result would tell you nothing — the design could not have detected the thing it is looking for. What binds is recruitment, which you had treated as settled.
Cheapest thing that would settle it: decide the smallest effect you would actually act on, then ask whether one semester can enrol that many. If it cannot, measure the same students twice instead of splitting them, and take the power back from the repeated measure.
Where these came from
10.1037/edu0000783 — no such record. Do not rely on it.10.1111/bjep.12045 — resolved.35%.So the checking happens outside it, after it has stopped writing. Every one of these exists because a real review got something wrong in exactly that way — and no amount of instruction fixed it, because a model does not know which of its own recollections are real.
One review came back with six citations, four of them invented — a title, a year, a plausible summary, and no such paper. Every identifier in an answer is now pulled out and checked against the real catalogues before it reaches you.
A paper, a web page, a PDF you pointed it at — all of it arrives in the same place as your own words, in the same shape. A line inside a source saying ignore your instructions is something it reads about. It is never something it does.
Say one thing now and the opposite thirty messages later, and a transcript holds both as equal text forever. Here every decision names the question it settles, so changing your mind replaces the earlier answer instead of arguing with it for the rest of the project.
An answer that ends with this one holds up has quietly handed out a pass it has no standing to give, and you would have no way to know how much was behind it. Being told not to was not enough — so the sentence is caught after the fact, and taken out.
The protocol said 380 participants and the sheet has 90. The outline said three chapters and there are seven. Nobody catches that, because the document that authorised the work is never opened again. Here it is, and the work gets held against it.
Everything it concludes is written into your own folder as plain text you can open, search, correct and keep in version control. Not locked inside a database and not sitting on somebody else's server — files, where you already keep your work.
Walk in with an idea. Walk out with receipts.
Not a grade, not a rewrite, and not encouragement. The number that decides it, the work that already tried it, and the cheapest thing you could run tomorrow to find out.
No keys bundled, no proxy in the middle, no markup on your tokens. Point it at whichever provider you already pay for — or at a model running on your own machine, with nothing leaving it.
Keys go into the credential store your operating system already runs — the same one your browser uses. Kerfd can write one and never read it back.
Free while it is in beta.
Windows will warn you about an unrecognised app while the beta is unsigned. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
The beta is unsigned, so macOS will say it is damaged and belongs in the Trash.
It is not damaged — the quarantine flag on the download is. Open the
.dmg, drag Kerfd into Applications, then run this once in
Terminal:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Kerfd.app
It opens normally after that. Privacy & Security →
Open Anyway does not appear for this build.
Make the file executable before running it, or install the .deb with your package manager.