Medium wants writers to work in public less often.
On November 9, 2026, the publishing platform opened TK, a private notebook and writing app, to anyone with a Medium account after an invite-only phase. TK is separate from Medium’s publishing platform, and its purpose is to help writers capture, organize, revise and share work before publication.
Chief executive Tony Stubblebine describes the split with a neat metaphor: “TK is the gym and Medium is the stage.” The app is now available for free through the web, Android and iOS, although a native desktop app remains on the roadmap.
An editor with an assistant built in
TK embeds an @TK assistant directly in the writing editor. A writer can type @TK in the middle of a sentence to check a fact, retrieve earlier writing or ask for help without opening another tab—the small convenience that usually becomes a full browser migration.
Medium says TK will not write a user’s essay. Instead, the first version includes skills for editorial feedback, headline feedback and matching a draft to the style guide for Medium publications. The app also creates a writing prompt each morning, sometimes drawing on earlier notes to help writers return to unfinished ideas.
The name comes from the publishing placeholder “TK,” meaning “to come.” Writers traditionally use it to mark missing information, though the spelling uses a K because few English words contain the “tk” letter combination.
TK also treats a writer’s archive as something more useful than a pile of forgotten documents. Searches, topics, tags and libraries can become wiki-style summaries containing themes, key ideas and links back to the underlying notes.
The first version includes a mobile app and widgets for voice and text capture, along with imports from Medium archives, Bear and Obsidian vaults. Markdown import and export are supported, but TK ships without a native desktop app; Stubblebine says Medium wants to add one.
Private notes, shared drafts and visible AI use
TK adds a social layer without turning every note into a performance for the algorithm. Social libraries let writers share drafts with groups, create open libraries for public journaling, request feedback before publication and develop a self-published book, while notes remain private unless users choose otherwise.
Users control access permissions on their work. TK does not measure pageviews or reward authors for getting traffic, which gives the app a different incentive from Medium’s publishing platform and its familiar audience metrics.
The writing in TK is not encrypted, so private access controls should not be mistaken for encryption. Medium states that no AI company trains on or uses a person’s writing without permission.
Medium also wants TK to show how writing was made. Published notes can disclose which material was human-written and which was AI-written, with provenance inspectable down to the prompts and source material.
“This is a start of what we believe is required to publish in the AI era, which is to make the provenance of writing clear, transparent, and inspectable, right down to the prompting and source material,” Medium said. That approach answers a real problem: writers may use AI while still wanting readers to understand the boundary between assistance and authorship.
Medium’s State of Writing Report 2026 supplies the reasoning behind those choices. In its Harris Poll survey, 71% of surveyed writers had used AI as part of their writing practice during the previous three months, while 60% distrusted their own AI-produced writing.
TK is also infrastructure for personal AI agents
TK includes an MCP server and a Claude skill, allowing agents to draw on a user’s stored positions, projects and unfinished ideas. The connection can run through Claude Cowork or Claude Code, giving an outside AI system access to the writing a user has chosen to store there.
Medium’s Claude Daily Note plugin demonstrates the setup. With TK’s MCP server connected, the plugin creates one document per day, updates that document in place and carries unchecked to-do items forward.
Its targeted edit operations are designed to preserve live edits, existing checkbox states and the user’s writing. That matters because an assistant that helpfully rewrites the thing you were still editing is less assistant and more mildly hostile intern.
The broader opening follows Medium’s September 16, 2026 post, which described TK as invite-only or available to Friends of Medium while wider access was being prepared. Stubblebine said, “I don’t think we’ve actually had a launch of anything important since 2017,” setting a high bar for an app that is still missing its desktop version.
TK’s pitch is not another place to publish finished work. It is a private workshop combining note-taking, journaling, feedback, archive search, AI assistance and provenance—an attempt to make writing more deliberate before it reaches the stage.
Based on
- Medium Opens TK Notebook to Writers with Inline AI Assistance — unite.ai
- Medium’s new TK app brings AI assistance directly into the writing process | TechCrunch — techcrunch.com
- Medium is launching a new note-taking app called TK | The Verge — theverge.com
- Mask AI Helps Freelancers and Agencies Turn AI Drafts Into Client-Ready Writing | Markets Insider — markets.businessinsider.com
