Dictation for developers: write code reviews, commits and prompts by voice

Look at what you typed today. Some of it was code. A lot of it was English: a prompt to Claude or Cursor, a PR description, three review comments, a commit message, a Slack thread explaining why the build broke. That's the part your voice is good at.

#Where voice beats typing

Prompts to AI assistants. Good prompts are long: context, constraints, what you tried, what "done" looks like. Speaking a 150-word prompt takes under a minute, and you stop cutting corners. More on dictating prompts.

PR descriptions and reviews. Explaining a change out loud is how you'd explain it to a teammate. Hold the key, talk through the diff, let go.

Commit messages. "Fix race in the session refresh when two tabs wake at once" is faster said than typed, and you'll write better ones when they're cheap.

Docs, tickets and Slack. The writing everyone puts off.

Rest for your hands. If your wrists ache by Thursday, moving the prose to voice cuts a big share of your keystrokes.

#Make it understand your stack

Speech models know English, not your codebase. Two settings fix most of it:

• Vocabulary: add the names you use, like Kubernetes, Supabase, PostgreSQL, Tailscale and your teammates' names. When the model hears something close, Sayburst corrects it to your spelling.
• Replacements: map spoken forms to written ones. "use effect" becomes useEffect, "pr" becomes PR, "next js" becomes Next.js. Replacements match whole phrases only, so they never fire inside other words.

#A setup that works

1. Raw mode for terminals. Assign Terminal or iTerm to the Raw mode so text arrives exactly as spoken, with no added punctuation.
2. A custom "Commit" mode. Create a mode whose instructions say "Rewrite as a git commit message: imperative subject under 60 characters, blank line, short body." Point it at a local model through Ollama or LM Studio, so nothing leaves your Mac.
3. Rewrite selection. Select a messy paragraph, hold the rewrite shortcut and say "make this a bulleted list" or "tighten this up."
4. Hands-free for long explanations. Toggle recording on, walk through the architecture, toggle off.

#Privacy matters more for developers

Dictating about unreleased features, customer incidents or security issues into a cloud service means that audio leaves your machine. Sayburst transcribes on your Mac, works offline, and never sends audio anywhere. AI polish is off unless you turn it on, and can run locally too.

It also won't type into password fields: Sayburst refuses to insert while macOS secure input is active.

Questions people ask

Can I use dictation for programming?

Dictation is best for the prose around code: prompts to AI assistants, PR descriptions, commit messages, code review comments, docs and Slack. For syntax itself, typing or your AI assistant is faster.

Does dictation work in Cursor, VS Code and Terminal?

Sayburst pastes into whatever field has focus, so it works in Cursor, VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Terminal, iTerm and browser-based tools like GitHub.

How do I get dictation to spell technical terms right?

Add them to the vocabulary (Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Supabase) and use replacements for spoken forms, like "use effect" to useEffect or "pr" to PR.