Medium's new standalone writing app puts an "@TK" assistant inside the editor for research, editing, and style checks — and lets authors publish notes documenting exactly how AI shaped a piece.
2026-11-10 · by Moe Ameen
On November 9, 2026, Medium launched TK, a free standalone writing app that puts an AI assistant directly inside the editor. It is available on the web to anyone with a Medium account, with a desktop app on the roadmap. The name borrows the newsroom placeholder "TK" — shorthand for "to come," the marker a writer drops where information still needs to be filled in.
The assistant is invoked by typing "@TK" followed by a request, without leaving the draft. Medium describes it as a private notebook: the assistant can run quick research lookups that would otherwise send you to another browser tab, help with editing and style matching, pull in writing you saved earlier, and suggest prompts. It ships with specific editorial skills — feedback on a draft, headline feedback, and checking a piece against a Medium publication's style guide. There is also a social layer for sharing early drafts and getting feedback. The editor imports and exports Markdown but is not itself a Markdown app, and because TK is built for collaboration, writing in it is not encrypted, though authors can set access permissions.
Two things make the launch notable beyond "a text box with AI in it." First, TK can connect to a writer's own AI agent through an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server or a Claude skill, so projects, positions, and ideas stored in that agent's memory can inform the draft. Second — the feature Medium leads with — authors can publish provenance notes explaining how AI was used in a piece. Medium's stated aim is to make writing's provenance "clear, transparent, and inspectable, right down to the prompting and source material." The company frames this against the risk it openly acknowledges: that AI can lower quality and blur the line between human and machine writing. Medium's position, stated as the company's, is that "artificial intelligence makes writing more important, not less."
The useful way to read this launch: Medium just made the *drafting* of a single essay better and kept the *publishing* pointed at exactly one place — Medium. That gap is the whole opportunity. A good piece you wrote in TK is a source, and most of its value is still locked up until it travels off Medium and changes shape for every other feed your audience lives in.
That is the work [Kompozy](/) does. Export the finished draft from TK as Markdown, drop it into Kompozy as a source, and the engine fans it into the formats one essay can't be on its own: a standalone [blog article](/glossary/output-buckets), an [email newsletter](/glossary/output-buckets), brand-exact [Carousel Posts](/glossary/hyperframes) and quote cards rendered through HyperFrames, platform-native [text posts](/glossary/output-buckets), and an avatar-narrated [Persona Short](/glossary/persona-shorts) that turns the argument into video without a camera. Every output is governed by your [Persona Brief](/glossary/persona-brief) so the whole set sounds like one writer, and [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot) schedules and publishes it across the eight social platforms plus blog and email from one queue, behind a per-post review gate. And if transparency is the reason TK caught your eye, note that Kompozy's per-post gate is where you keep the human in the loop before anything ships — you approve each generated piece, you don't rubber-stamp a batch. TK makes the draft; Kompozy makes it a week of on-brand content everywhere your readers actually are.
TK is a free in-editor AI writing app Medium launched on November 9, 2026. It puts an assistant inside a web-based editor that you invoke by typing "@TK", and it handles research lookups, editing, style matching, headline feedback, and checking a draft against a publication's style guide. Its signature feature is provenance notes that let authors disclose how AI was used in a piece.
TK is free for anyone with a Medium account. It launched on the web, with a desktop app on the roadmap.
No. TK is a writing and drafting tool; it makes a Medium post better and does not generate video, images, carousels, or newsletters, nor publish to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X, or LinkedIn. To turn a TK draft into multi-format content across those platforms, export it as Markdown and run it through a generation-and-publishing engine like Kompozy.
Provenance notes are short published disclosures explaining how AI was used in a piece. Medium frames them as a step toward making writing's provenance "clear, transparent, and inspectable, right down to the prompting and source material," in response to concerns that AI can blur the line between human and machine writing.