Launching today
Flowing turns your reference library into live context for academic writing. As you draft, it highlights key terms, recalls relevant passages from your PDFs, and previews the source page. Then, with the right sources already in context, you can ask, polish, and continue writing with evidence grounded in your own papers.
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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! 🙌
@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?
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@roopesh_donde I'm really glad it resonates with your experience. 😊
At the moment, Flowing is primarily designed for individual researchers, so real-time collaboration isn't supported yet. It's definitely something we've heard interest in, though.
Yes, you can absolutely work on multiple projects. You can create separate documents and switch between different paper libraries depending on what you're writing.
Right now, our main focus is helping researchers stay grounded in their own literature while writing. Once that workflow is solid, we'll continue exploring features that make research collaboration easier as well.
Thanks again for the thoughtful questions!
@goodbetterbest Awesome, I will recommend it to students. Real time collab is tricky, but needed as we have mostly group projects in academics.
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.
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@luzunefe16087 Thanks! I really like this idea.
Our current goal is to make it much easier to find the right evidence while you're writing. But as you pointed out, retrieving a relevant paper is only part of the problem—it's equally important to know whether the evidence actually supports the point you're making.
A workflow that helps researchers spot mismatches between their draft and the cited evidence would be incredibly valuable. We'll definitely keep exploring ideas along these lines.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback!
📚 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! 🚀
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@callmericky Thank you so much—it really means a lot coming from someone who built Paperly with me.
Looking back, I think Flowing actually grew out of the same question we were asking back then: how can researchers spend less time searching for information and more time thinking and writing?
This time the focus shifted from reading to writing, but the goal is still the same—helping researchers make better use of the knowledge they've already collected.
Thanks again for all the support over the years! 😊