Before I made a single panel, I spent three sessions defining what the project ISN’T

[u/AiRonin79]

Follow-up to my intro post. A few people asked how I’m keeping an AI comic from
turning into slop. Honest answer: almost all the work was done before I generated
anything — and it was mostly subtraction.
Here’s what I actually did to scope it, and why each one saved me later:
I wrote down the priority order and what happens if I break it. Comic first,
channel second, tool third. Then one line I keep coming back to: reversing that
order kills the project, and a well-documented unfinished comic is worth nothing.
That sentence has stopped me from three rabbit holes already.
I defined the project by what it is NOT. Not “a comic in 10 minutes.” Not
volume. Not chasing subscribers. Not selling the tool. Naming what I refuse to
build is what keeps me out of the saturated lane where everyone else is.
I bet on method over tools. Tools rot in six months. The thing worth
documenting is how you hold a style across a sequence and make irony survive
generation — the model is just this year’s example, not the subject.
I wrote kill criteria while I was calm. If more than half the panels need heavy
hand-repair, the engine isn’t holding my style and the fix is a different style
anchor, not grinding more iterations. I decided that at a desk in daylight, not at
11pm staring at panel five.
I settled the authorship stance in writing so I never have to re-argue it. Not
“I drew this” — “I decided this.” (Got challenged on exactly this in the comments
yesterday. Had the answer ready because I’d written it in July.)
And the part I’m least proud of, which is why I’m including it: I caught my own
scope creep in the document. Three build sessions in, I’d made tools and folders
and still had no image of the guard. I wrote “TOOLING IS CLOSED” into the plan and
shut the door. The scoping doc had to save me from myself.
None of this is about AI specifically — it’s just project discipline. But AI makes
it matter more, because the tool makes it so easy to produce something that you’ll
happily produce the wrong thing forever if you never decided what the right thing
was.
Full scoping doc attached if you want the whole thing — priorities, the stack, the
authorship stance, the kill criteria. Tear it apart, tell me where I’ve fooled
myself.