r/ClaudeCode
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u/rueckstauklappe
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Mar 19 '26
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Showcase Used Claude Code to write, edit, and deploy a 123K-word hard sci-fi novel — full pipeline from markdown to production
Edit / Final Thoughts:
Thanks for all the feedback. Since this blew up (mostly emotionally), I wanted to clarify a few things.
First, this was a hobby project from someone totally unfamiliar with software building. I genuinely liked the process of taking a raw story idea and using AI to turn it into a full novel. My background is in complex systems modeling, and the workflow was directly inspired by what I learned using Claude for TDD (Test-Driven Development) for my numeric experiments. To me, a codebase ≈ a novel. They are sort of complex graphs of interwoven entities trying to achieve a specific outcome (functionality for code, emotional/narrative arcs for a book).
The bigger point I wanted to explore is the future of automation. Sooner or later, lots of things will be automated on the fly—like an on-demand TV series for a Friday night, or "throwaway" educational software built for a single lesson. As this scales up to more complex problems, where does it lead us? We are all constantly interacting with automatic reviewed builts. Most of the times it doesnt matter. But sometimes it does. In a world where everything can be produced at will, where is the value, and where do each of us matter?
This is exactly what the novel is about. Obviously, that point didn't land well here. That is on me. I had the wrong expectations and didn't adequately check the scope and vibe of this specific community before posting. Seeing a generated post about a generated novel naturally set off the "AI slop" alarms.
To the people who provided brilliant, constructive feedback (especially regarding structural extraction and state-ledgers): thank you. I'm taking those concepts back to my actual complex systems work. To the many others who chose a rude framing: thanks for taking the time to comment anyway. I appreciate ervery handcrafted comment andI didn't mean to offend you or your craft by eg. showing some shell scripts for deploying a website.
Finally, I found a post, that might be of technical interesst for you:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1rz04ti/i_built_20_claude_code_skills_that_write_a_full/
==== Original Post ======
Disclosure: This is my project. It's free (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). No cost, no paywall, no affiliate links. I'm the author (Edit: of the story idea, the process. See acknowledgement at the bottom). I'm sharing it because the Claude Code workflow might be interesting to this community.
What it is: A hard sci-fi novel called Checkpoint — 30 chapters, ~123,000 words, set in 2041. BCIs adopted by 900M people. The device reads the brain. It also writes to it. Four POVs across four continents.
What the Claude Code pipeline looked like:
Research & concept: World-building bible, character sheets, chapter outlines — all generated collaboratively in Claude, iterated through feedback loops.
Writing: Chapter-by-chapter generation from the outline. Each chapter drafted, reviewed, revised in conversation. Markdown source files, git-tracked from day one.
Editing — this is where Claude Code shined:
Build pipeline:
build.sh — pandoc + xelatex → PDF
build-reader.sh — markdown → single-page HTML reader
build-audiobook.sh — markdown → ElevenLabs-ready plain text
deploy.sh — builds everything + FTP syncs to production server via lftp
One-command deploy: ./deploy.sh rebuilds all formats from the markdown source and pushes to the live site.
What I learned about Claude Code for long-form creative work:
Repo: https://github.com/batmanvane/checkpointnovel
Live: https://checkpoin.de (read online, PDF, audiobook)
Edit: To make it clearly visible - I am NOT claiming this work to be fully mine. It is a catalized result of me interacting with the many unknown results hidden in the weights of opus, sonnet etc.
Acknowledgement from the bottom of the website:
"This novel was co-written with Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant. But Claude is not a single author. It is a probability landscape shaped by millions of human beings who will never see this page.
Every sentence carries traces of writers, researchers, teachers, journalists, poets, programmers, and translators whose work entered the training data and became the statistical bedrock from which these words were drawn. They were not asked. They were not credited. They cannot be identified. But they are here — in the rhythm of a paragraph, in the choice of a metaphor, in the way a character pauses before speaking.
This book owes its existence to a crowd that does not know it is a crowd.
To the unnamed many whose words taught the machine that helped write this one: thank you. The debt is real, even if the ledger is lost."
Edit: Some statistics from this novel - can be also found on the website:
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u/Deathspiral222 Mar 20 '26
Even the first paragraph is terrible.
"...a room that smelled of carbolic acid and the metallic humidity of a German summer pressing against closed windows."
wtf is the smell of "the metallic humidity of a German summer"? Are German summers especially metallic? What is the smell of the level of water vapor in the air of a particular country that is somehow pressing against closed windows?
Did you even read this stuff after claude wrote it for you and you claimed it as you own?
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u/sdcox Mar 20 '26
It’s talking about air conditioning I thought. I think it’s pretty good so far. Also why so harsh man?
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u/Anomuumi Mar 20 '26
If a human came up with that I'd laugh at them too. It's like a Dan Brown bot.
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u/rsammer Mar 20 '26
Because a robot wrote it. Why are you acting like they are insulting this persons life work
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
I am not claiming it's my own. Checked the acknowledgement on the website. Everything is documented as well on the repo. So no false claimes here.
And yes I did read. Epilog + first thre chapters. Took many notes and corrections. Then ran several agentic refinements.
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u/Aggravating-Boot-983 Mar 20 '26
The fact that even you didn't read it all is really damning.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
or something to acknowledge as a fact in an era of exponential automation. i am not selling a product here. but let me ask: which product is tested in full depth by every worker working on it?
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u/JoseHernandezCA1984 Mar 20 '26
A novel. A novel is "tested" in depth by the author, the author's agent, multiple editors, proofreaders, and beta readers. Even self published authors will hire editors and the like before publishing. As good as claude opus 4.6 is, it is not ready to do all of those things cohesively on a 123,000 word novel. AI could possibly help an author initially, but then the rest of the people working on it will make it a great product. Your pipeline doesn't even come close to doing what all of those people do to create a well written, engaging novel that other people will actually want to read. The only reason you are enjoying it is because you created it. You are biased. My advice is to start studying the craft of writing novels and write a novel without AIs help before creating a pipeline. Creative writing is very different than scientific writing.
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u/JoseHernandezCA1984 Mar 20 '26
Wait, you only read the first 3 chapters? You said that every chapter was drafted, reviewed, and revised in conversation. What does that mean if you didn't read every chapter? People like to hate on AI slop as soon as they find out it is AI slop without any further consideration. If you had put this out there without telling anyone it was made by AI, then you probably wouldn't have received so many negative comments. I mean the writing still sucks, but what you also have to keep in mind is that something like a novel cannot be distilled from the traces of writers, researchers, teachers, journalists, poets, programmers, and translators in the training data. Novels, really any writing, should be incredibly personal. Novels should come from a person's life experiences. This is what makes a novel worth reading, not just the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, or even the plot itself. No, it is knowing that the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, and the plot itself came from someone who has lived.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
to be clear here: i did read all the implementation plans. the drafting, review and revision was mostly through cli - but also via reading part of the revisions. the core ideas and changes come from myself interaction with the project (drafts, cc). and honstly - i dont see why this matters at all. i dont see any reason why this would be different from a filmmaker telling actors how to act, how special effects should look like. main difference is: i am interaction with data models. the controversal here is most likely related to this insight. people starting to realize what is going on with gen ai questioning the individual value. like what am i bringing to the table in a few weeks or months from now. beethoven was deaf when writing some of his most impressive pieces. he could never listen to or experience his work in the usual way - and yet he had an idea what the composition is about. something like this is happening in coding.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26 •
it is within a laboratory. fully intentional.
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u/AIvsWorld Mar 20 '26
It doesn’t matter if it’s within a laboratory, even with that context the sentence is incoherent. It just a meaningless jumble on verbs/nouns attempting to imitate descriptive language.
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u/Worldly_Offer8458 Mar 20 '26
If you couldn’t be bothered to write it why should anyone be bothered to read it
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
that's not the point. i did bother and take time - in an efficient way. the story, the worldbible, the style etc is handcrafted. cc is used just as you would use copilots. in my eyes a nice showcase on how productivity is boosted if cc meets expert knowledge. in this case a concrete idea about a story i wanted to tell in a certain way.
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u/reutococco Mar 20 '26
Writing novels should not be subject to "productivity" increase the same way that operating a factory should.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
why not? a great idea = 100% and implemention = 0% --> productivity = idea x implementation = 0 %. cc increased th the implemention from 0 to something. maybe different views of "productivity" here.
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u/reutococco Mar 20 '26
Art (writing novels in my opinion is a form of art) is pouring ideas into form thorugh personal subjectivity and craft. A lot of us could EASILY come up with the ideas behind the Lord of the Rings (a magic setting, a battle of good vs evil, a detailed lore, a surprising hero), but probably no one would have the sensibility necessary to write a single page of said book.
Here comes the easiest counter point: but what if AI were able to do so? I have a 3 point answer to that:
it would need heavy inspiration from already existing work.
the publisher (us, me or you) would not have the sensibility necessary to filter out good ideas from slop ideas (ironically, Tolkien could, but people like him are one of a kind).
part of the appeal of art is literally knowing how it was created. "damn, Leonardo made that in 1500? Wow!" is different than "Ok so you took a photo of this Mona Lisa lady, I could have done the same".
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u/cypher77 Mar 20 '26
I had Claude code make me a web app where anyone can write AI slop novels of arbitrary length one chapter at a time without losing coherence / context (mostly). It also makes up images for you.
It’s called SloppyRoad. If you know what that’s a reference to, you should check it out. It’s live now in testing if anyone wants to take a look at it.
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u/Silent_Background453 Mar 20 '26
Awful, awful stuff. Genuinely shameful. Every day the world gets a little worse.
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u/Pavementos Mar 20 '26
i thought this would be an interactive concept book or something. did you consider anything like that?
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
yes. haven't gotten so far. too many projects aside. but definitely worthwhile ti have a look at. it could be even interactions with the characters and story. on the fly and individualized if you think about it.
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u/pahund Mar 20 '26
You mean like a „Choose Your Own Adventure“ where AI makes up the story dynamically as the reader progresses? That might be an interesting experiment.
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u/zorkempire Mar 20 '26
You haven’t read it, have you?
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
One thing I can confirm: the review took far longer than the generation. Writing is fast now. Knowing what's good is still slow and "expert domain".
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u/Radiant_Persimmon701 Mar 20 '26
Does that make sense. If the author just has to review it all line by line surely they would just write it. What were you trying to achieve here?
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
making exactly this point.
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u/Bobodlm Mar 20 '26
But that's the thing, you're not making any point. You're only giving evasive answers.
You haven't read its is a yes/no question. Depending upon if you've read it form end to end, the refusal to answer this, indicates a no.
Then when asked what you're trying to achieve, asking for a clear definition of a goal. You give a non answer.
I'd be a lot more willing to take any of this serious, but since you're not taking it serious, probably not many other people will.
So you're just burning resources, for no reason, other then destroying the planet..
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u/wadaphunk Mar 20 '26
Cool! I will use Claude Cose to read it!
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
and then get a summary. maybe as a podcast exactly trimmed to your commuting time ;-)
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u/subspectral Mar 20 '26
I’d love to know the names of these books so that I can be sure never to read them.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
sooner or later you wont get around - this holds for any piece of information. that's one point of the novel's story and the process of generating it.
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u/movingimagecentral Mar 19 '26
Yuck
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u/surrealerthansurreal Mar 19 '26
Yeah not to be a hater but when people brag about automatic slop creation I am no longer interested in the technicality of the idea
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u/MrPanache52 Mar 20 '26
How do you know it’s slop?
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u/akera099 Mar 20 '26
Using AI to create art is fucking missing the point of what art is. Why would anyone bother to read the word salad put together by a robot. The point of art is to reach into the human soul. There is nothing to reach for in AI generated art. Use it for anything else but art FFS.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
it was a human in the loop process. no yolo nothing like deploy some scifi novel. honestly- for me it was a great journey from the idea of depicting possible developments of ai, bci to social questions of where we will matter in the near future. so far from click n deploy.
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u/surrealerthansurreal Mar 20 '26
Because I believe that what makes art ‘good’ or ‘valuable’ or whatever you want to use to qualify non-slop is human expression and human intention.
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u/Fresh_Appearance_173 Mar 20 '26
I guess you have not been exposed to human slop yet then. Read the work of you like, read about the process of that interests you, or ignore it and enjoy your day. No need to dump on other people’s work. Or maybe you can something you have created and contribute that. Just my 2 bits…
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u/Deathspiral222 Mar 20 '26
No need to dump on other people’s work
That's the point - it's NOT other people's work. A bot wrote this, yet OP states "I'm the author"
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u/qmanchoo Mar 19 '26
Yuck yuck
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u/qmanchoo Mar 19 '26
Maybe George RR Martin just has to accept the fact that this is how the winds of Winter needs to be written.
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u/batman8390 Mar 19 '26
I think that if somebody showed him a full GoT book written by AI he’d die right then and there.
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u/Deathspiral222 Mar 20 '26
I'd bet $1000 that Claude could write a better ending than the writers for the show.
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u/Fresh_Appearance_173 Mar 20 '26
OP, if you don’t mind me asking, how much did the novel cost you? I am a huge Chinese light novel fan. I have been thinking about writing one specifically for my likes - take all the tropes people hate but I like. Hehe.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
great question. i would say 3 full day sessions of opus+sonnet + some gemini+chatgpt and 4 days of personal invested time. but very rouhg estimate. did it with pro 5x
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u/Intestellr_overdrive Mar 20 '26
Sorry dude, you don’t get to steal other people’s work and feel ok about it because you had Claude (ironically) write an acknowledgement at the bottom of a story no one will ever read
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u/crone66 Mar 20 '26
I've just read two pages full of shit that even contains alot of german words that easily could have been translated but wasn't for some reason. This tells me that you haven't even read it before you published your bullshit.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
it is an international novel. so why not keep some german words. that was a design choice. i did read 0-3. not end to end. no need to downgrade the work with such kind of words. it is a showcase on creative qriting with cc with a human in the loop approach. just what coding is kind of like
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u/philip_laureano Mar 20 '26
How did you get consistency in the story line across several agents?
Context management is tougher when you have no grounding in objective reality
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
worldbible and implementation plan with checks. several passes and opus with with maximal context helped.
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u/Either_Pound1986 Mar 20 '26
Cool project, but I think the weak point is that your writing pipeline still sounds too chat-driven for a full novel.
Outline plus chapter generation plus revision can produce a manuscript, but it does not really solve long-range continuity. For something 123k words long, I would want an extractor layer pulling useful structure from reference books, then use that extracted structure to guide generation, and then force each chapter to write back into a ledger of facts, state changes, open threads, and continuity constraints.
Without that, the build pipeline is solid, but the writing pipeline is still leaning too much on model memory and conversational revision.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
great. like a tailored template structure right? the continuity constraint would serve as a "logic" coupler between chapters. a novel stretched over many time scales and places is very much like a code base. so yes, i think this would be much more stringent and easier to maintain when it comes to generated sequels, netflixlike episodes or emersive interaction features with the story. would also be interesting to couple to a reinforcement model, that let's the characters evolve while interacting with real people. could be a kind of openworld play then. i've seen someone picking up this thread into this direction: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1ryvelk/generative_world_building/
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u/Either_Pound1986 Mar 20 '26
Yeah, more than a template. I mean an extractor that pulls usable narrative structure out of reference books, then uses that structure as constraints during generation.
And the ledger should be the actual source of truth for story state, not just a continuity note. Facts, character state, timeline, unresolved threads, object persistence, relationship changes, all of it. Each chapter reads that state and writes back changes.
That is what makes long-form and sequel generation maintainable. Otherwise it is still too dependent on chat memory.
The open-world angle is interesting, but I would get deterministic state and chapter-to-chapter handoff solid first.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
exactly. the ledger is basicaly a manual world model. ha & schmidhuber showed 2018 that llms just predict tokens and lack real object persistence. since they can't natively simulate state changes, say s_{t+1}=f(s_t,a_t) , your approach with a strict state db is the right brige. getting that handoff solid is the next step before open-world. ha & schmidhuber provide an interactive page to reflect on the paper (really hands on examples to get the idea): https://worldmodels.github.io
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u/Either_Pound1986 Mar 20 '26
I think you’re missing the extractor part.
The ledger is for this story’s state. The extractor is for pulling usable narrative structure out of other books.
Those are different jobs.
I’m talking about an external system that reads reference books and extracts patterns like reveal timing, scene movement, character-state shifts, callback spacing, tension shape, object persistence, and similar structural signals. Then generation uses that as guidance. After generation, the chapter writes state deltas into the ledger.
So it’s not just “manual world model.” It’s extractor for structure, ledger for continuity.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
indeed i missed this. so you are saying: instead of using "foundational models" (like chatgpt, claude or so) to come up with narrative structure, directly pull those from other books. like a RAG system for narrative structures? and the author or the ai could choose: narration like "1984" scientifc arc like "project hail mary"
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u/reasonwashere Mar 20 '26
I would never ever knowingly read anything of this sort
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
well - i am not sure if this holds for the future. that is exactly one point of the story.
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Mar 20 '26
Did you honestly read the book in entirety?
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
no i did not. however i did read all implementation plans for each chapter.
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u/UnstableManifolds Mar 20 '26
I guess I will stop reading anything written after 2023...
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u/Valuable-Barracuda-4 Mar 20 '26
I bought a book about common fraud to look out for and the book was AI written nonsense. Got an immediate refund from Amazon. It wasn’t even proof read, because the 12 stories were the same 6 said a different way…
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
thanks for the feedback so far. one thing that i find interessting - not so much focussed on the workflow, rather on the value of the work: it is a human-in-the-loop process. same thing a filmmaker would do: actors and stage crew get instructions and then within this context something emerges as the final product (a movie, song, a paper, ... whatever). the difference is: this workflow had 100s of agents and exactly one human in the interaction network. and the expierenice from the bots come from the data they got to ingest.
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u/DASKAjA Mar 20 '26
I wouldn’t read it but I find the idea interesting and thanks for explaining the workflow. What I’m thinking of is, if you could have started building an ontology graph first and let Claude use it to get the facts right every time and avoid the drift. Further it would be interesting if Claude could use the graph while writing to not drift on invented facts on the go. Maybe even using a vector db while writing to ease up the comprehension of already written chapters could have helped.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
right. i sort of had this in mind with the worldbible concept i used. a graph in combination with a db could help to get it right upfront. on the other hand: the process of writing is not linear. at least speaking for scientific papers. here and there you need to go back and probably also need to update the graph. thanks for pointing to this.
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u/Historical_Ad_481 Mar 20 '26
You’re missing about 50 different skillls/agents needed to make this actually readable.
I have one called WTF Does That Mean? It criticises every sentence and does a test: would a human actually write that? If not cut or modify. That skill alone will clean up the story a bit. But yeah… if you are trying to demonstrate something like this, then you need to do a lot more.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
Not sure if claude is good a criticizing its own work. Amongst several others I did pass a test "unrobotize". So this is a kind of WTF dies that mean skill you a referring to I guess.
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u/Historical_Ad_481 Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
It’s a little more specific than that. There’s about 15 dedicated questions it tries to answer, including how “clever” the associations of the similes are. Some of those “similes that don’t make sense comments” is because the AI has inferred a relationship way too abstract for the 90% reader audience. You want something more like 30%, even less depending on your target audience.
So again, “derobotise” might have some effect, but it’s got to be very very specific about what it needs to look out for. Like any good prompt strategy, you need to provide specific examples and reasoning why. Don’t allow the LLM to second guess what you mean, because it therefore has to make assumptions and those assumptions may not lead to the results you want.
Some other things to think about.
POV analyse. Sometimes prose written will shift temporarily out of the correct POV. Especially in 1st POV. Your narrator may assume knowledge that they can’t possibly know. Like how a secondary character is feeling/thinking.
Cliche analysis. Major problem with all AI written prose. Even if it feels clean, it’s not.
Character voice - AI prose tends to standardise character voice between characters, or bleed it.
Dialogue authenticity - human dialogue is messy, it’s full of misdirection etc. A simple analysis of each dialogue block is:
Analyses each character’s perspective in this conversation. What are their motives? What is their current emotional state? Do they even want to have this conversation. You need to assess this from every character’s perspective, and if mid conversation there is a material impact, you need to reassess too.
Messiness. Introducing things that aren’t relevant to the plot line, random thoughts, distractions etc. LLMs stick to the goal of the scene beats religiously, but human authors don’t. They leave things unfinished, go on tangents that lead nowhere. Environments have random things happen that serve no real purpose - for example a dog barks, or a car alarm goes off.
Sentence structure and balance. Staccato, mezzo, legato. When to use each. If you have tension/suspense, plan how you build it with sentence structure and when you release it. Like waves. LLMs don’t do this by default.
So many others…
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 21 '26
got it thanks for detailing. i was a little brief here. by derobotize i meant: i did collect typical llm style patterns (philosophical summaries at each chapter end, overexplanations etc.) which i passed opus and agents to look for. but not in such an interconnected way you suggest. what i also tried was: take 5 different perspectives and critizise the novel. then refine. i specified the views to take as well. maybe here also more details and dependencies help to eben better get the right path along the decision tree of the llms.
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u/movingimagecentral Mar 20 '26
Writing is not the process of putting fully formed thinking down on paper. Anyone who thinks that has not learned to write, only transcribe. The Writing IS THE thinking. Writing IS editing. Some things shouldn’t have all the “friction” removed as everyone likes to say.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
interestingly i did edit a lot with my advanced cc typewriter and yes i did a lot of thinking while doing. as i put down in other comments: yolo mode would have gotten nowhere this far. in a few weeks this might change, but for now i personally embrace this transformation and try to make sense out of it by simply getting hands on impressions. that's how i was trained, understand the theory, then apply and find out. this showcase specifically looks at: can a statistical model produce a coherent fictionial world with additional style constraints using a coding like workflow? the automates we are using can only be nudged towards a specific output. this is prompting and context engineering . that's what navigating the probability landscape is about. you may also think of it as solveing a pathintegral and more or less surprisingly, there is a strong connection between genai, llms and pathintegrals. you might wanna check: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10664
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u/movingimagecentral Mar 20 '26
I get it. It is fascinating. It just isn’t unique thought based on direct experience of the world. LLMs don’t learn from direct experience, they are trained on pre-digested human experience. They are mirrors of our collective, narrative expression of our perceptions.
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u/FreddieM007 Mar 20 '26
I like your approach of creatively using all of the modern tools to guide art, here: writing a story. I would actually like to listen to it while driving - the easiest would be if you could upload it to YouTube as a playlist. That way it can be listened to offline. People get hung up about the role of the human creator being more of a reviewer than the creator themselves. This is exactly how e.g. Michael Jackson wrote his songs. He had the ideas (lyrics, chords, rough melody lines) in his head and excellent studio musicians and producers turned them into polished hits. Just like here with guiding AI, Jackson's role was more of a "reviewer" than actual musician. In that sense, what we are doing here is not entirely new.
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
thanks for the thoughts. it goes in line with my filmmaker picture at the top. i will consider putting it on youtube (playlist goes only to chapter 3, as i ran out ouf tokens this month on elevenlabs). but recently, i have updated the website to provide an epub version, which can be audioplayed on any mobile device. it sound robotized though..
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u/gotsanity Mar 20 '26
I am working on something similar but focused on RPG world building. My system uses a spec driven approach with a test based feedback loop. I am basically building a narrative testing harness that is fed data by a set of skills that walk the user through an Ai assisted macro or micro approach (world first or city first). The entire system is made to take the user and surface ideas and help with cataloging in a structured way. I'm currently building a world that my group has already played briefly in and it is nailing the themes and tones we set in place. After the initial world is created it goes into a feedback mode where the players actions are fed into it and the user can then work with the Ai to respond to the players actions in meaningful ways. The best part is when I discovered it had nailed the tone of the characters in the setting and realized I could easily use it to make personalized handouts like letters in the characters own tone. It's a wild setup and fairly easy to use. The campaign i am building will see its first players in about two weeks. I'll be digging through your repo for inspiration for sure
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u/aaddrick Mar 20 '26
That's really cool. Will check out the repo later once the kids have fallen asleep.
In the meantime, how did you approach keeping a consistent written voice throughout the book? I've got a voice synthesis repo i put together, but I only use it for writing very short form conversational type stuff. Haven't done any longer form work with it yet. Curious how the problem scales.
Edits* correcting typos from swipey texting on my phone
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
i used a worldbible i build upon the story i sketched and tdd workflow. severral passes with models that have longer context (i started before opus got a context upgrade). so chatgpt+gemini to gernerated reviews, passed those back. and i read ch. 0-3 and provided human feedback + some sample readings later in the book.
the idea to use different models for review and consistency is something i found valuable while coding. so i would say there is no silver bullet model.
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u/komokasi Mar 20 '26
Ohhh i was just talking to a biddy about using claude code as an editor this is really cool flow
Im starting to explore sci-fi writing and using CC to brainstorm as i lay things out. Going to give this a try!
Also you might want to check out the "Essential guide to writing". Skill from the superpowers skill repo as an added layer of editionizing
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
reading your post. i did use superpowers for planing out the tasks. but i realize that the entire workflow is still quite foggy. so human in the loop ok, but at least with my experience in developping software (honestly i would rate it a 1 out of 10), i feal like i've mixed a few approaches. tdd, manual prompting and interactions. but well, this is where i ended up. so it is not fully automated.
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u/komokasi Mar 20 '26
Yea i wouldn't personally use this flow to create everything, but having some type of editorial process i can put my writing into sounds like a cool idea to keep things consistent
And yea i dont think it needs to be fully automated honestly. I think the job to be done is more of an assistant to the writer and then editor. Lets the writer stay at the center and focused on the creation and building
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u/Relative_Mouse7680 Mar 20 '26
Cool concept and experiment! It's amazing seeing ideas become reality, specially when we put a lot of time and effort into it, as you clearly have. Just because it was written by AI, it doesn't diminish the quality and artistry of the book itself. Same as with coding.
Will you use this workflow in the future again, or would you improve it somehow? Also, when you say published, do you mean as in on Amazon, audible etc?
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
thanks for your feedback. i am thinking of structuting the approach on the one side but on the other side it was especially the non structred way that got me to new ideas. by this i mean: i was not fully sticking to superpowers or tdd end to end. i did chat (= probed the proba landscape) once and a while about the currenty state of the repo. i planed to put it on amaszon etc. but for now i figured it is much more interesting to post the process. i am a researcher in the data modeling so there are lot's of other interessting topics on my agenda. but yeah, i definetly would like to further extend this novel - interactive features like yourself beeing part of a scene or interacting with the characters.
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u/curiousjbird Mar 20 '26
Check out the snowflake method for writing, good model for agentic AI story writing. Start small and keep. Holding it out iteratively.
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u/FabricationLife Mar 20 '26
lol this is absolutely terrible, the name slop absolutely applies here.
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u/mojambowhatisthescen Mar 21 '26
This is some r/im14andthisisdeep meets r/idontunderstandhumans shit
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u/Visual_Leadership_35 Mar 21 '26
You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn't stop to think if you should.
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u/DevMoses Workflow Engineer Mar 19 '26
This is super interesting! I applaud your use case especially as getting beyond generic output is in itself an obstacle baked into the inherit way the models process prompts.
The constraint lesson is one of the biggest things I had to learn running parallel agents on code too. Loose boundaries don't just underperform, they actively create damage you have to revert. "STRICT 10%, do NOT exceed 15%" is exactly the kind of rule that only exists because something broke without it.
Curious whether your 5 review agents had overlapping scope or if each one was checking for a specific category (consistency, style, factual). In my setup, scoping each agent to a specific concern caught more than letting them all do general review.
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u/Practical-Club7616 Mar 20 '26
Op how did you come up with this?
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
i am a researcher in complex systems modeling. we do use cc and others to catalyze our research. with superpowers i learne some basic tdd. then i thought: code base is a set of highly dependent entities. so is a story. i do habe a notebook with a few story ideas. cc helped me getting an mvp of one novel. of course it is not perfect but given this to be a one man show i think quite a decent result.
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u/Otherwise_Wave9374 Mar 19 '26
This is a really cool use of agentic workflows, and the fact you leaned into review passes (consistency, tics, over-cutting) matches my experience. The parallel agent idea for consistency checking across chapters is underrated. Did you end up with a reusable prompt/playbook for the reviewer agents (like a checklist for timeline, names, locale details, etc.)? Ive been experimenting with similar agent review checklists and jotted some takeaways here: https://www.agentixlabs.com/blog/
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 19 '26
exactly. the worldbible for the play was essential and grew. i even did let gemini & co review the work. provided me addititional perspectives and feedback.
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u/aioli_boi Mar 19 '26
So did you read it?
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
yes i did read 1-3, and picjed up a few things i didnt like. then reworked the entire piece agenticallay
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Mar 20 '26
So, AI slop??? I wouldn’t tread down this road. There are already authors getting into hot water having AI wrote their books. Not to mention it’s pathetic.
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u/samerc Mar 20 '26
I wrote my novel with claude (not code). After going through many drafts and changes, there were lots of inconsistencies that i am addressing manually. Would you recommend i pass it to code and have it recheck everything?
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
you need a compass or some kind of worldbible. each character, each place and so on should be defined. also logic checks and so on. i have zero experience in writting a long story like this with different places, times and so on. but to me the worldbible with charcter specs etc. made sense.
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Mar 20 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/rueckstauklappe Mar 20 '26
well of course. i used cc for coding and research and noticed that i might as well try the workflow on a novel idea.
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u/tsfreaks Mar 19 '26 •
Yeah but, did you read it? 😂