---
title: Learning your voice
description: Mining a personal rule package from writing you have already done.
icon: graduation-cap
---

The built-in rules encode general advice. `lawlint learn` encodes *yours* —
generating a rule package from prose you have already written.

```sh
lawlint learn ~/my-writing/
```

Point it at a file or a directory of `.docx`, `.md`, or `.txt`. Requires a
configured model; see [Setting up AI features](/docs/guides/ai-setup).

## How it works

1. **A statistical pass over the whole corpus**

    Local and deterministic. Measures the distributions that characterize your
    writing — sentence length, opener variety, punctuation habits — across
    everything you gave it.

2. **An AI mining pass over a small sample**

    Only a sample goes to the model, and only to name the patterns the statistical
    pass surfaced. The bulk of your corpus is never uploaded.

3. **A self-consistency gate**

    Every generated rule is run back against your own corpus, and any rule that
    flags your own prose is discarded. A rule package derived from your writing
    that fires on your writing would be worse than useless.

## Options

```sh
lawlint learn ~/my-writing/ --out .lawlint/rules/house
lawlint learn draft.docx --model anthropic:<model>
```

| Prop | Type | Default | Description |
| - | - | - | - |
| `PATH` | `path` | - | A file or directory of your writing (.docx, .md, .txt). |
| `--out?` | `path` | `.lawlint/rules/personal` | Where to write the generated rule package. |
| `--model?` | `string` | - | Mining model, overriding the lawlint init AI preferences. |

## Using the result

The output is an ordinary rule package — a `style.yaml` manifest and a
`rules/` directory of Markdown files, exactly as if you had [written it by
hand](/docs/guides/authoring-rules). Read it, edit it, delete the rules you
disagree with, and commit it.

`lawlint init`'s default config already lists `.lawlint/rules` in `ruleDirs`, so
a package written to the default `--out` is picked up automatically. Otherwise:

```sh
lawlint --rule-dir .lawlint/rules/house draft.md
```

:::tip
Generated rules are a starting point, not an oracle. Run `lawlint rules test` on
the package to see each rule evaluated against its own examples before you rely
on it.
:::