I’m building Readua — an AI-assisted reading app for deep reading (beta invites)

jakeyoung — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 13:59:15 +0000

I’m inviting a small group of people to try Readua, a reading app I’m building to help you read deeply with the help of AI — without replacing the act of reading itself.

At a high level, Readua is “just a reading app”. But my goal is bigger: I want it to cover the reading situations people actually have every day — text, audio, and video; web pages, PDFs, and EPUBs — so when you want to truly read something (not just bookmark it), you’ll reach for Readua.

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Since LLMs took off, I’ve been using them to improve both the speed and depth of my understanding. The effect has been surprisingly real for me: it feels like the limits of language and cognition get pushed a little further, and this wave seems more fundamental than the previous ones.

Naturally, I wanted to turn that into a product.

At the same time, I saw a lot of “AI summary” apps and browser extensions that give you sliced, extracted “highlights”. They’re useful, but they don’t replace reading. For many topics, reading the original text is unavoidable — and I still couldn’t find a product that matched how I actually want to read.

So I started building it myself.

Two goals I’m focusing on

Make the full reading experience great. If the reading experience isn’t solid, everything else is noise.
Explore what “AI-assisted reading” should really feel like. This isn’t something you solve in one shot — it needs iteration with real readers.

Last month I read a post from Andrej Karpathy on X, and it matched my own habit really closely: do a first pass manually, then use the LLM for explain/summarize, then Q&A to close gaps.

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1990577951671509438

I’m starting to get into a habit of reading everything (blogs, articles, book chapters,…) with LLMs. Usually pass 1 is manual, then pass 2 “explain/summarize”, pass 3 Q&A. I usually end up with a better/deeper understanding than if I moved on. Growing to among top use cases.

Build in public

I really want to build something that’s genuinely useful to other people. I’ve talked with a bunch of folks about how they read and where they get stuck, and I’ll keep listening and shipping based on what I hear. Build in Public is something I plan to keep doing consistently.

If this resonates with you, I’d love for you to join the beta list:

https://www.app01.ai/console/beta-invite

I’ll send invites as new features land. Web and desktop versions are coming soon as well.

DEV Community: jakeyoung

I’m building Readua — an AI-assisted reading app for deep reading (beta invites)

Two goals I’m focusing on

Build in public