You ship code. Trace ships your story.

Content fromproof, notprompts.

Your best work is buried in private repos, internal docs and Slack threads. Trace reads it, ranks it, and writes posts in your voice — with a citation on every one, pointing back at the thing that produced it.

LinkedIn today · X, Instagram, Substack nextNo card for the Strategy Doc
SourceDraft
commit 8f2c1ad · vismay/trace
feat(billing): no-card 7-day trial
+142 −38 · src/billing/trial.ts
21 Jul 2026, 14:07 IST

A 7-day trial without a credit card shipped on 21 July 2026. The card was filtering out the wrong people — engineers evaluating a writing tool on a Sunday, who will not type a card number before seeing a single draft.

Based on commit 8f2c1ad to vismay/trace · 21 Jul 2026
01  —  Work mining

One week of your work, traced.

Trace watches the trail you already leave. Scroll to move through it — including the day you shipped nothing.

Mon 8 Sep
Rate limiter rewritten to a token bucket after the third 429 report.
commit · 3 files · +204 −96
Tue 9 Sep
PR #21 merged: default site URL moved off the Vercel preview domain.
pull request · 1 review · 2 comments
Wed 10 Sep
Pricing doc edited — the Pro tier gained a paragraph on why 40 posts, not unlimited.
google drive · pricing-v3.docx
Thu 11 Sep
Nothing. Four hours of interviews and a migration that didn't land.
no signal · not a problem
Fri 12 Sep
Weekly check-in, spoken: “the hard part was deciding what not to build.”
check-in · 7 questions · 9 min
Sat 13 Sep
Narrative plan generated. Theme: constraints you chose on purpose.
plan · 5 posts · pillar balance corrected
Sun 14 Sep · 09:00
Published, with the commit and the check-in both cited underneath.
linkedin · approved by you on Sat
Mon · commit
02  —  Hook variants

Three openings. You pick, it learns.

The same sourced story, opened three ways. What you approve, edit and reject is what the voice profile converges on.

Variant 1 · plain
A 7-day trial without a credit card shipped on 21 July 2026.
Pillar · SystemsAnti-slop: passed
Variant 2 · the trade-off
We removed the credit card from the trial and the conversion rate didn't move. Here is what it actually filtered.
Pillar · SystemsAnti-slop: passed
Variant 3 · the number
Four lines came off the pricing page in July. Trial starts went up; trial-to-paid held.
Pillar · SystemsAnti-slop: passed
03  —  The anti-slop engine

Things Trace will never write.

These are not suggestions inside a prompt. They are compiled into the product, and they govern this page too — we cannot ban a pattern in your drafts and then use it in our own marketing.

01
Regex pre-filter

Cheap, instant, catches the literal openers.

02
Detector model

Catches manufactured vulnerability and announcement voice that no regex will.

03
Regenerate, up to three times

Same source, same pillar, different draft.

04
Then flag it for you

Nothing violating the rules is ever published quietly.

  • Hot take: most engineers don't understand X
  • Unpopular opinion…
  • I'm thrilled to announce
  • Nobody talks about this, but…
  • I almost gave up. Here's what I learned.
  • Comment YES if you agree
  • Keep building ❤
  • Leveraging AI to disrupt the paradigm
  • One line per sentence. For emphasis. Every time.
04  —  How it works

Two layers. The order is not negotiable.

Layer 1 runs once and must finish before Layer 2 turns on. Every competitor opens with a blank box; Trace refuses to write until it knows who you are.

L1The Positioning Engine

Fifteen to twenty questions across career arc, expertise, current work, audience and voice. Speech is the default input — the browser transcribes, you edit, then submit. Output: a one-page Strategy Doc with positioning, three pillars, contrarian takes, a five-beat origin story, a 90-day metric and a voice profile. Free, and useful on its own.

01Sources connect

GitHub, file uploads and AI coding-session transcripts today. Google Drive and Notion are next; calendar and Slack exports after that.

02Work gets mined

Ranked Story Seeds, each tagged to one of your pillars and carrying the source reference it was drawn from.

03The weekly check-in runs

Five to seven adaptive questions, spoken. When the repos are quiet, this is the source instead of a dead week.

04A narrative plan is generated

A theme for the week, five to ten recommendations, pillar balance, and the proof assets worth capturing before you publish.

05Drafts arrive with three hooks

In your voice, citation attached, already filtered by the anti-slop engine before they reach your review inbox.

06Voice calibration learns

Approvals, edits and rejections feed back, so next week's drafts sound more like you than this week's did.

05  —  When the work goes quiet

Some weeks you ship nothing.

A tool built on momentum has nothing to say in a week with one commit and no docs. Trace's check-in becomes the source instead: seven questions, spoken, under ten minutes. You still end the week with a plan, and you still haven't invented anything.

Signal status is always visible. Trace tells you when it is thin.

06  —  Pricing

The Strategy Doc is free. Keep it either way.

Free

Strategy Doc

$0no card

The 30-minute interview and the document it produces: positioning, three pillars, origin story, voice profile. Downloadable as a PDF, yours to keep whether or not you ever pay us.

Start the interview
Pro

The content engine

$4.99per month

Everything in Free, plus GitHub sync, uploads, the weekly check-in and narrative plan, 40 posts a month with three hooks each, and voice calibration. 7 days free with 5 posts, no card.

Start 7 days free

Cancel from the account page in two clicks. No fake urgency, no buried cancel button.

Trace makes publishing feel like documentation, not self-promotion.

Start with the interview. If all you ever take from Trace is the Strategy Doc, that is a fair outcome.