// the take
COPE is an Electron desktop editor for writing classical Chinese poetry (绝句/律诗), built around the tonal rule system that governs these forms. It's for people who actually write 五言/七言 jueju and lüshi and want the metrical rules checked as they type, not a general writing app with Chinese support bolted on.
The tonal checker handles real edge cases of the rule set (孤平, 三平调, 失对, 失粘) rather than just the simple '一三五不论' heuristic, which is where most hobbyist implementations stop. It ships real reference data (平水韵, 中华新韵, 康熙字典, and the full 全唐诗 corpus) rather than requiring the user to source these separately. The line-wise nearest-neighbor search against Tang poems is a genuinely useful writing aid — showing how past poets phrased similar images is more actionable than generic autocomplete. The author also explicitly throttles the Markov-chain suggestion feature so it stays an editing aid instead of degrading into a poem generator, which is a restraint most 'AI writing tool' repos don't show.
Dead project: last commit is from November 2022 with no indication of further work, so bug reports or OS compatibility issues (Electron on current macOS/Windows) are unlikely to get fixed. There's no test suite anywhere in the tree, and the Markov/BoW logic lives directly in src/app.js and src/meter.js with no apparent separation for testing. The author's own stated accuracy for the style-similarity model (33.4% top-1) is weak enough that the 'who do you write like' feature is more of a novelty than something to trust. The audience is also very thin — this only matters to someone actively composing classical-form Chinese poetry, which rules out almost everyone, including most Chinese speakers.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →