Tom Riddle's Diary Comes to Life in Open Source

An open-source project has modernized the famous diary of Tom Riddle from the Harry Potter saga, transforming it into an artificial intelligence-based system capable of reading handwriting and responding dynamically. The initiative, called "riddle", was published on GitHub by developer Maxime Rivest and works on a reMarkable Paper Pro device.

The experience aims to reproduce the narrative effect of the novel: the user writes by hand with a stylus, and after a brief pause, the text seems to be absorbed by the digital page, as if the ink were disappearing. Shortly after, the response generated by the artificial intelligence gradually appears, written in italics and animated stroke by stroke, before slowly fading away.

In the demo video shared by the developer, the "character" of the diary is played by an advanced language model, Claude Fable 5 from Anthropic. The system relies on a model with vision capabilities: handwritten text is transformed into an image and sent to an OpenAI-compatible API service or alternatives like OpenRouter, Groq, or local solutions.

Noah found my work in progress open source repo and already got it working on his remarkable. I will further improve it, but this might be already enough if you can't wait to have your own Tom Riddle diary. Link 1 Link 2 -- Maxime Rivest ????? (@MaximeRivest) July 5, 2026

The AI Tom Riddle Diary

The response is then streamed back, sentence by sentence, allowing the animation to start even before the model has completely finished text generation. The delay between the end of the writing and the beginning of the response is about a second, contributing to the "magical" effect of the interaction.

However, the project requires specific technical conditions: it is necessary to use a reMarkable Paper Pro in developer mode with an installed launcher, as well as an API key. Furthermore, the developer warns that the software operates with root privileges, as it interrupts the original interface of the device and directly controls the e-ink engine.

Rivest emphasizes that the system has only been tested on this model of tablet and urges caution for those wishing to replicate it. It is important to keep SSH access active and to be well-acquainted with system tools, as improper use could compromise the device.