Every invention is a Faustian pact. It amplifies certain things and atrophies others.
Personally I think the approach I'll take with literature is the same as other things: I'll evaluate it in its merit and not try to guess on its origin. We're already awash in people accusing actual human writing of being "AI" while meanwhile AI writing slips under the radar. It's pointless. It is what it is when it arrives at my eyeballs.
If I wrote a book I would not use the AI to craft prose, not from AI-hate but because to me it kind of defeats the purpose. I would, however, use it as a first pass proofreader and editor, and maybe as a brainstorming "rubber duck that talks back." It's pretty good at those things.
-- From the link:
“This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”
But Thamus replied,
“Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.
You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
This is not a slop book producer. I mean it is but mostly for a niche of off grid weirdos like me. We are not writing for the public. It's like fanfic. On off grid forums and discords.
I think if someone wanted to produce a slop book for amazon with 1667 there are easier tools for that.
But I'm not taking it away. I'm adding to it. I'm also writing my own stories. My post marketed it the wrong way I think. I'm suddenly getting a lot of hate mail in my inbox.
What it really is is a kind of choose your own adventure. You can be 6 years old and write stories and then an hour later play a choose-your-own-adventure game and no one would find that weird
The next generation is so f*cked. It's going to be far worse than I imagined before.
We are going to have kids who, instead of imagining their own fantasy lands, are given them by AI. Of course the AI will be far superior to a 6 year old- how will they be able to resist the AI drip, when even adults can't.
A generation growing up without imagining.
So depressing.
I guess we have a few years before it starts. Or maybe it already has.
Wow.
I hope this doesn't happen.
I hope the kids are smarter than us.
You're getting lots of hate because people assume this will only subtract, that people will use tools like this to replace their creative process. Anyone who does that isn't creative to begin with, and isn't trying to be creative.
Creative people love to play with new tools. Photography was supposed to destroy all art, but it became its own art form. Did synthesizers destroy music? Musicians even figured out how to turn a record player, a device made for nothing but replaying existing music, into a musical instrument. Look up "turntablism." Give an artist anything and they'll start fiddling with it and seeing what it can do, and they'll do that with AI just like they did with electronics and record players and anything else.
The people flooding e-book markets with slop are doing a new variation on the dropship get rich quick scheme, not trying to create books. They don't care what's in there, just that they can game reviews.
I expect artists playing with AI to get into hacking models and model runtimes themselves. It's one reason I think open weight models are so important. They're hackable, remixable, re-trainable.
They say to throw away the first page. It needs to sting a bit, then we're writing.
For 'context priming' I'd like to see a tool that supports this. Not just alts and variations, but an assistant or companion that challenges what's already on the page, and sometimes doesn't even look back at what's been thrown out.
Hm, I want something like this, except it doesn't write for you at all, instead it helps you build out your storyline, gives you writing prompts and feedback, maybe sometimes suggests ideas if you feel stuck, helps keep your character/story bible in order and text aligned with it, and gives you encouragement and visual feedback as you go along.|
Maybe add in some different "AI reviewer" type things, one to read broadly for enjoyment and give feedback, another as an editor to fine-tune particular sections. Even with these it should provide feedback, not re-written sections.
But I love the TUI approach and keeping things simple and organized for you, so you don't have to bother with all that. Bonus if it had some nice LaTeX / epub / PDF / html reader output.
Agree, the application of LLM often feels too literal. I like when LLM inform the UX but a layer or two removed for example like you said by giving feedback on things produced by the user or combining multiple things that happened over time and acting on that. That's where the magic lies and where I see users actually be happy having AI in their workflow.
I did add an aside mode that I use for this. Where I ask questions about the storyline, remind me about characters, give me feedback or generate a prompt for the next chapter.
Would be interesting to split this out into a separate app that only does this
what you are describing is exactly what i built (or tried/am trying to). it's called enough: github.com/0gsd/enough. it is difficult to evangelize because most LLM tools for writers generate prose. i suspect eventually an audience will come around to it, but who knows.
This is really cool. Like a q/a system you can plug on top of your own files. I starred and will be trying it on some of markdown files. Thanks of the tip
You might be interested in language models the same way lots of great artists in the past have been interested in generative art. Burroughs would be an example.
More broadly, you might be interested in language models because they are new, and you don't want to discount the value of new, constantly-evolving tools for your art form until you have explored them and understood their strengths and limitations.
I personally have not found language models very useful at all for serious work thus far. I am curious, though, about why many people are openly dismissive of the potential artistic value of what is an extremely new tool, and - maybe more importantly - those who choose to use it.
How other writers write doesn't strike me as any of my business, beyond what I can learn from their methods.
It's a form of low tech holodeck. You write the stories you want to read. I love these vintage pulp detective novels but no one writes them anymore so I write them myself for myself, and a few of my fellow weirdos on weird discords.
I suppose I am sympathetic to the feeling of having weird tastes uncatered to by the market. But in that instance, why not actually try and write such stories yourself? And as a reader, what is the appeal of reading stories regurgitated by a stochastic algorithm when the possibility is there instead of connecting to another human soul?
And, anyway, so what if they are bad? They are authentically the product of a single human soul rather than some grey-gruel average of millions. There is an awful lot of value in that.
What's the point of that? I mean, as you invent the story, you already know what happens next, even with your tree system, you're choosing what happens before the AI writes it. So what exactly do you get out of the AI writing it? The handful of sloppy details and stereotypical character traits the AI synthesizes without your explicit input? Sounds horrible. It seems like you're pivoting to "this tool is just a twist on roleplaying by yourself haha" due to the backlash in the comments and the intent has always been to write slop for others, not just yourself. The whole idea behind this makes no sense otherwise. And you know, it could have been a decent tool without the AI crap because story crafting surely can be tedious, because yes, multiple branches naturally grow from developing any creative idea really.
My friend was absolutely obsessed with writing character backgrounds and world setting stories using ChatGPT for a while. It took almost a year for him to come up for air and realize all the stories were effectively the same, and the hooks/tricks/twists were all very generic.
it can be addictive to tell stories with friends or world-build, so why not a 'friend'?
This is really cool! I've started building a similar tool with some different ideas based around the way I like to ideate with LLMs and write. Debating whether to open source it because it's so tied to my process.
Will be interesting to see where you take this. I'd love to see more experimentation around AI tooling and UX to support creativity.
I know it's easier said than done, but don't let the anti-AI crowd get to you. Would love to exchange ideas (and be emotional support if the mean comments are taking their toll)! Definitely reach out (I'm scott@ (the domain in my profile))
So... You don't write with language models... You have a language model write for you... You can spend all the time you like developing structure and ideas, but if you don't actually do the writing you haven't written it.
This is spectacularly wrong headed. If you want a book with your name on it for adulation or career reasons, but lack the interest, time or talent to produce one - hire a ghost writer. Writers are affordable and plentiful.
Similarly if you have a hyperspecific interest, kink or genre preference - use your position as a presumably well remunerated tech person to hire a writer to cater to it. Trust me, we need the patronage.
If you're looking for the pleasure of writing, you will unfortunately have to undergo, as all writers have through history, the process of suffering and discovery that we call writing.
Downvotes are disturbing and ideologically motivated rather than bothering to engage with the point.
You're not a musician if you hop onto Suno and generate a song. You're not a filmmaker if you open Gemini Omni and prompt some video. And you're not a bloody writer if you have an LLM do it for you. Talk about wheelchairs for the mind...
There are a lot of negative comments already - many are not in-keeping with the HN guidelines. Hopefully this won't end up getting your Show HN post flagged.
The strength of feeling in those comments - such as this one - is really interesting:
>"you've missing [sic] the entire point of writing fiction."
Some would argue that if art makes you feel anything this strongly, it's 100% doing its job. Maybe you're not missing the point at all!
I'm interested to try it out, and perhaps build some features on top of what it's doing already. I've been using trees a lot for the novel I've been working on for the last couple of years, but haven't managed to find the best way to visualise them in a UI, so I'm excited to see what you settled on. Trees can get really unwieldy really fast, with basically infinite combinations - especially if you're working at a very granular level.
I'm curious about anyone else here who has run into the same or a similar problem, and how they approached it. There are more plausible paths through this manuscript than I can personally hold in my head, which is quite different from approaches I've used in the past, where structures have been more formalised and deviation from them was thus quite limited.
>but haven't managed to find the best way to visualise them in a UI, so I'm excited to see what you settled on
yes exactly. My main motivation for writing this was to try my hand at it. I'm not happy yet. First started looking at loom interfaces but all have the same problem of how you visualize it.
My try is a in the map (m) if you want to check it out. I feel like the path view works reasonably well but tree and mass not so much.
I agree with your sentiment and all kudos to the author for being so creativity in creating such tool. I like the idea of having a list of "facts" to keep track of characters in the story.
Even if I won't use it since I dislike using the terminal, I still think its very creative tool for writing.
Strangely I can also understand all the hate but what are you going do? For all those that hate, don't shoot the messenger - the author of the tool is only using those tools that everyone else is also using.
We are collectively going down a very sloppery (pun intended) slope and the author of the tool is just being creativity for their own purposes. Hate the companies pushing this slop down our throats, not those that make use of the existing tools and pushing them to new uses - that's called learning.
I also built a webui but it's not very fleshed out.
After all this hate I'm thinking about stripping out the ai parts of the webui and making it a manual writing tool maybe. Keep the branching and tree visualizations
Makes me curious. What context is sent? Whole story, including later chapters? Just up to that paragraph? Planning and character description documents? Any way to control all of that?
Saw your edit. Yeah I had that too. But I wanted something more ai driven because I'm not a trash writer. I want that lowtech holodeck feel where I tell the model to take the story and it writes a chapter for me. Plus wanted to keep branching trees of different versions
sorry i'm a writer who edits... this project is genuinely interesting and i'm curious to see where it goes. i would try to market it as ML instead of AI, given the current temperature of AI in publishing and writing circles. if somebody can improve upon track changes in a git-like, narrative-tree way, then that might be super useful tool!
Yeah many are trying to solve this. It's really not easy to get the UX right. Git changes can get deep and wide
I wanted to have a simple way to navigate my story in a tree form but cli is really not great in displaying those. Lazygit is the best imo but still not great. WebUIs are not really better
Looms seem to work a bit better, which is also what 1667 is based on. But still I don't know needs work
What type of hate are you getting if you don't mind me asking?
I like your tool by the way, I don't understand what sort of person would have such visceral hate towards someone's creation.
They don't have to use it but it is nice for you to share your creation.
Don't be put off by them, they actually secretly use LLMs for their own work and they are embarrassed of putting it out there to protect their own 'programmer' ego.
Got 4 emails in my email inbox. I suspect all from the same guy. Weird rants about how ai is going to eat peoples brains how I'm going to hell and calling me a bunch of nasty names. Probably not wrong but you know he could have said it nicer.
Removed the email address from the homepage just in case.
There are some good use cases, personal fiction, etc. The issue is mostly people not disclaiming it’s AI. I can’t get mad at the tool builder. Neither can I assume the worse of every user.
That being said, I wouldn’t have published something like this because I do assume the worse.
But it’s morally wrong to assume every one lacks honesty…
I just fundamentally disagree with this. On one hand, sure, you can argue that there is no direct harm caused by using LLMs to generate fiction for personal consumption. But on the other hand, I feel like there is a deep spiritual deadening that arises when we no longer must engage with the works of others to find fiction that satisfies our tastes. You have niche interests? What you want to read doesn't exist in a meaningful quantity or even at all? Great! You should write it! But you should do so yourself rather than asking a computer to regress your great idea to the mean.
Is it SillyTavern but TUI or is the flow different? I know SillyTavern is more dialogue focused, but surely it can be configured for novel writing instead?
Not sure why you're getting so much hate. Internet is already chock-full of slop, a new TUI-based tool is not going to make it measurably worse.
As for the hate I think it's because I called it AI writing tool that brings is a crowd that I really didn't want to address or ever envision as users.
I like seeing what people create, and you've created something with some interesting features, particularly around the path map and keeping all drafts. I'm forever duplicating a paragraph and rewording it 6 or 7 times, then deleting the rest - and the next day think "no try #2 was better than the one I kept".
Ignore the haters, they're a HN rite of passage. Good luck with your writing!
I think you've built some awesome. Even if, as you said, it proves to be for an audience of one (you), I know some people out there are grateful for you sharing it. Comments are not reality most of the times. There is a silent portion which would like your idea and you just don't know. People here in HN tend to be very polarized towards a certain idea, come up with intellectual arguments to justify their emotional reactions. Of course you can find some light in negative comments, but still, to be taken with a grain of salt.
Someone said "a generation growing up without imagining. So depressing." This reads like old man yells to clouds. Through history you can find these comments about upcoming generations all over the place... We can make the same arguments in the past "oh you spend so much time reading others stories instead of writing your own? Yeah, you lack imagination kid, you're in big trouble."
To have nuance and avoid over-generalizing is a good exercise in today's society I guess.
Thank you. I didn't think this would be so controversial. A few people are in my email inbox with nasty comments. I've removed my email from the website. I'm not used such visceral hate.
Anyway I have children myself. They play, they write, they draw. And occasionally we do tech stuff like this. I use it as a choose-your-own-adventure with them. We also make up our own stories for bedtime. I don't see these things as exclusive
I'm sorry you're getting the lash end of the whip. The rage against the (literal) machine is very high right now. I appreciate you sharing your creativity, and frankly, I am taking notes on what you've built for a related but different project.
The reaction is not because the OP used AI to create software.
The reaction is because OP's software facilitates the outsourcing of creative writing to a agentic content mill, and many HN users take issue with that.
This is so depressing for me. The drip will be everywhere.
AI feels like a Faustian bargain that has been struck on my behalf by others who do not know me.
"Tools" like this make me feel nothing but a profound sense of sadness and despair.
Not a new sentiment. This is over two thousand years old:
https://www.anthologialitt.com/post/the-god-thoth-and-the-in...
Every invention is a Faustian pact. It amplifies certain things and atrophies others.
Personally I think the approach I'll take with literature is the same as other things: I'll evaluate it in its merit and not try to guess on its origin. We're already awash in people accusing actual human writing of being "AI" while meanwhile AI writing slips under the radar. It's pointless. It is what it is when it arrives at my eyeballs.
If I wrote a book I would not use the AI to craft prose, not from AI-hate but because to me it kind of defeats the purpose. I would, however, use it as a first pass proofreader and editor, and maybe as a brainstorming "rubber duck that talks back." It's pretty good at those things.
-- From the link:
“This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”
But Thamus replied,
“Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.
You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
I think I am going to move into a rural area and be a glassblower. I'll never be Chihuly, but my work will be my work.
This is not a slop book producer. I mean it is but mostly for a niche of off grid weirdos like me. We are not writing for the public. It's like fanfic. On off grid forums and discords.
I think if someone wanted to produce a slop book for amazon with 1667 there are easier tools for that.
Here's a question. Tangential I know. "Digression!"
If you had a kid, let's say 6 years old, and they had a "super hero" they wrote stories about.
What would it mean, if you took away their creative process and replaced it with this.
Does that child have a lesser "life-experience?" Or not?
What about you?
But I'm not taking it away. I'm adding to it. I'm also writing my own stories. My post marketed it the wrong way I think. I'm suddenly getting a lot of hate mail in my inbox.
What it really is is a kind of choose your own adventure. You can be 6 years old and write stories and then an hour later play a choose-your-own-adventure game and no one would find that weird
The next generation is so f*cked. It's going to be far worse than I imagined before.
We are going to have kids who, instead of imagining their own fantasy lands, are given them by AI. Of course the AI will be far superior to a 6 year old- how will they be able to resist the AI drip, when even adults can't.
A generation growing up without imagining. So depressing.
I guess we have a few years before it starts. Or maybe it already has.
Wow.
I hope this doesn't happen. I hope the kids are smarter than us.
You're getting lots of hate because people assume this will only subtract, that people will use tools like this to replace their creative process. Anyone who does that isn't creative to begin with, and isn't trying to be creative.
Creative people love to play with new tools. Photography was supposed to destroy all art, but it became its own art form. Did synthesizers destroy music? Musicians even figured out how to turn a record player, a device made for nothing but replaying existing music, into a musical instrument. Look up "turntablism." Give an artist anything and they'll start fiddling with it and seeing what it can do, and they'll do that with AI just like they did with electronics and record players and anything else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgpZag6xyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRVmiqm84k
The people flooding e-book markets with slop are doing a new variation on the dropship get rich quick scheme, not trying to create books. They don't care what's in there, just that they can game reviews.
I expect artists playing with AI to get into hacking models and model runtimes themselves. It's one reason I think open weight models are so important. They're hackable, remixable, re-trainable.
They say to throw away the first page. It needs to sting a bit, then we're writing.
For 'context priming' I'd like to see a tool that supports this. Not just alts and variations, but an assistant or companion that challenges what's already on the page, and sometimes doesn't even look back at what's been thrown out.
Forgetting can be just as effective as capturing.
Hm, I want something like this, except it doesn't write for you at all, instead it helps you build out your storyline, gives you writing prompts and feedback, maybe sometimes suggests ideas if you feel stuck, helps keep your character/story bible in order and text aligned with it, and gives you encouragement and visual feedback as you go along.|
Maybe add in some different "AI reviewer" type things, one to read broadly for enjoyment and give feedback, another as an editor to fine-tune particular sections. Even with these it should provide feedback, not re-written sections.
But I love the TUI approach and keeping things simple and organized for you, so you don't have to bother with all that. Bonus if it had some nice LaTeX / epub / PDF / html reader output.
Agree, the application of LLM often feels too literal. I like when LLM inform the UX but a layer or two removed for example like you said by giving feedback on things produced by the user or combining multiple things that happened over time and acting on that. That's where the magic lies and where I see users actually be happy having AI in their workflow.
I did add an aside mode that I use for this. Where I ask questions about the storyline, remind me about characters, give me feedback or generate a prompt for the next chapter.
Would be interesting to split this out into a separate app that only does this
what you are describing is exactly what i built (or tried/am trying to). it's called enough: github.com/0gsd/enough. it is difficult to evangelize because most LLM tools for writers generate prose. i suspect eventually an audience will come around to it, but who knows.
This is really cool. Like a q/a system you can plug on top of your own files. I starred and will be trying it on some of markdown files. Thanks of the tip
Why would you want to write fiction with language models? Serious question.
What you would become, in effect, is the fictional Soviet 'writer' from Sam Kriss' 2011 short story 'The Machine'.
https://samkriss.com/2011/10/01/the-machine/
I do not think there is anything to aspire to in that.
You might be interested in language models the same way lots of great artists in the past have been interested in generative art. Burroughs would be an example.
More broadly, you might be interested in language models because they are new, and you don't want to discount the value of new, constantly-evolving tools for your art form until you have explored them and understood their strengths and limitations.
I personally have not found language models very useful at all for serious work thus far. I am curious, though, about why many people are openly dismissive of the potential artistic value of what is an extremely new tool, and - maybe more importantly - those who choose to use it.
How other writers write doesn't strike me as any of my business, beyond what I can learn from their methods.
It's a form of low tech holodeck. You write the stories you want to read. I love these vintage pulp detective novels but no one writes them anymore so I write them myself for myself, and a few of my fellow weirdos on weird discords.
I suppose I am sympathetic to the feeling of having weird tastes uncatered to by the market. But in that instance, why not actually try and write such stories yourself? And as a reader, what is the appeal of reading stories regurgitated by a stochastic algorithm when the possibility is there instead of connecting to another human soul?
Oh I do. They are just utter garbage but that's beside the point.
This caters to a different lets say need.
Like I said in another post it's more like low tech holodeck or maybe create your own adventure. Where the story evolves based on simple directives
> They are just utter garbage
As someone once said, "Fail again. Fail better."
And, anyway, so what if they are bad? They are authentically the product of a single human soul rather than some grey-gruel average of millions. There is an awful lot of value in that.
Yeah not wrong. But as I said this is not a replacement tool for my writing but another hobby, akin to roleplaying maybe
What's the point of that? I mean, as you invent the story, you already know what happens next, even with your tree system, you're choosing what happens before the AI writes it. So what exactly do you get out of the AI writing it? The handful of sloppy details and stereotypical character traits the AI synthesizes without your explicit input? Sounds horrible. It seems like you're pivoting to "this tool is just a twist on roleplaying by yourself haha" due to the backlash in the comments and the intent has always been to write slop for others, not just yourself. The whole idea behind this makes no sense otherwise. And you know, it could have been a decent tool without the AI crap because story crafting surely can be tedious, because yes, multiple branches naturally grow from developing any creative idea really.
I'd love to hear some ideas about non ai tooling. I do write myself (terribly).
Maybe the tree system and branch switching would still work without attaching it to an LLM backend.
But the editor would have to be more advanced I think.
Would be cool to try and build something like that.
My friend was absolutely obsessed with writing character backgrounds and world setting stories using ChatGPT for a while. It took almost a year for him to come up for air and realize all the stories were effectively the same, and the hooks/tricks/twists were all very generic.
it can be addictive to tell stories with friends or world-build, so why not a 'friend'?
Yeah that's why I spend time on discords to share. You can very quickly fall into this llm psychosis adjacent place where you just go round and round
World building, story boarding/ story arc building, etc are great uses for an LLM in fiction.
Sure, if you don't actually want to do the work of, you know, making something
I went down this road six months ago with tool called Lantern though specifically for writing text adventure games.
I had it working and then realized that no matter how hard I put walls up between my artistic abilities and the llm was impossible.
The llm’s interference would eventually corrupt my own thinking process.
I tossed it and know anything I write will stand apart from GenAI.
This is really cool! I've started building a similar tool with some different ideas based around the way I like to ideate with LLMs and write. Debating whether to open source it because it's so tied to my process.
Will be interesting to see where you take this. I'd love to see more experimentation around AI tooling and UX to support creativity.
This was also tied pretty much to my process. Just publish it. Would love to exchange ideas.
The only thing I would avoid is calling it an AI writing tool haha. I didn't realize this was such a sore topic. Probably naive of me
I know it's easier said than done, but don't let the anti-AI crowd get to you. Would love to exchange ideas (and be emotional support if the mean comments are taking their toll)! Definitely reach out (I'm scott@ (the domain in my profile))
So... You don't write with language models... You have a language model write for you... You can spend all the time you like developing structure and ideas, but if you don't actually do the writing you haven't written it.
This is spectacularly wrong headed. If you want a book with your name on it for adulation or career reasons, but lack the interest, time or talent to produce one - hire a ghost writer. Writers are affordable and plentiful.
Similarly if you have a hyperspecific interest, kink or genre preference - use your position as a presumably well remunerated tech person to hire a writer to cater to it. Trust me, we need the patronage.
If you're looking for the pleasure of writing, you will unfortunately have to undergo, as all writers have through history, the process of suffering and discovery that we call writing.
Downvotes are disturbing and ideologically motivated rather than bothering to engage with the point.
You're not a musician if you hop onto Suno and generate a song. You're not a filmmaker if you open Gemini Omni and prompt some video. And you're not a bloody writer if you have an LLM do it for you. Talk about wheelchairs for the mind...
We're setting ourselves up to the be the humans on the ship Axiom from WALL-E
> context window: 32,768
Seems a bit low to me. Yeah, I know that's way bigger than a book, but surely there is conversation, iteration history, etc
Context window depends on the model used. I used gemma4 I think and set it to 32k so startup is faster. I think even gemma supports up to 200k
Yeah, I'm aware, I just think it's an unusual default for a harness to use
Should be more? I envisioned the user of this as kind of local koboldcpp or lmstudio users with limited resources
There are a lot of negative comments already - many are not in-keeping with the HN guidelines. Hopefully this won't end up getting your Show HN post flagged.
The strength of feeling in those comments - such as this one - is really interesting:
>"you've missing [sic] the entire point of writing fiction."
Some would argue that if art makes you feel anything this strongly, it's 100% doing its job. Maybe you're not missing the point at all!
I'm interested to try it out, and perhaps build some features on top of what it's doing already. I've been using trees a lot for the novel I've been working on for the last couple of years, but haven't managed to find the best way to visualise them in a UI, so I'm excited to see what you settled on. Trees can get really unwieldy really fast, with basically infinite combinations - especially if you're working at a very granular level.
I'm curious about anyone else here who has run into the same or a similar problem, and how they approached it. There are more plausible paths through this manuscript than I can personally hold in my head, which is quite different from approaches I've used in the past, where structures have been more formalised and deviation from them was thus quite limited.
Thanks for sharing this!
>but haven't managed to find the best way to visualise them in a UI, so I'm excited to see what you settled on
yes exactly. My main motivation for writing this was to try my hand at it. I'm not happy yet. First started looking at loom interfaces but all have the same problem of how you visualize it.
My try is a in the map (m) if you want to check it out. I feel like the path view works reasonably well but tree and mass not so much.
This is really difficult to solve.
Happy to hear your ideas or see your solutions
I agree with your sentiment and all kudos to the author for being so creativity in creating such tool. I like the idea of having a list of "facts" to keep track of characters in the story.
Even if I won't use it since I dislike using the terminal, I still think its very creative tool for writing.
Strangely I can also understand all the hate but what are you going do? For all those that hate, don't shoot the messenger - the author of the tool is only using those tools that everyone else is also using.
We are collectively going down a very sloppery (pun intended) slope and the author of the tool is just being creativity for their own purposes. Hate the companies pushing this slop down our throats, not those that make use of the existing tools and pushing them to new uses - that's called learning.
I also built a webui but it's not very fleshed out.
After all this hate I'm thinking about stripping out the ai parts of the webui and making it a manual writing tool maybe. Keep the branching and tree visualizations
> Some would argue that if art makes you feel anything this strongly, it's 100% doing its job.
It's pretty easy to invoke disgust and pain. That doesn't make public toilets and getting shot pieces of art 100% doing their job.
Makes me curious. What context is sent? Whole story, including later chapters? Just up to that paragraph? Planning and character description documents? Any way to control all of that?
Whole story up to the context limit. Then it starts dropping stuff. But I didn't want auto dropping or auto summaries like what other tools do.
I like to be strategic summarize the correct places when the context gets full.
There is a request inspector that shows everything that is sent.
I'm experimenting with prompt ordering strategies as well. this is surprisingly complext when you take into account the different model providers.
For example local models usually do a different form of prompt caching than for example openai and anthropic
The UI looks beautiful,I like its style.
i just use track changes for that + a "trash" doc, or an entirely new story if it needs more space, but go off.
i also made an app for my writing process and quickly realized it was a distraction from the actual work of writing
Saw your edit. Yeah I had that too. But I wanted something more ai driven because I'm not a trash writer. I want that lowtech holodeck feel where I tell the model to take the story and it writes a chapter for me. Plus wanted to keep branching trees of different versions
sorry i'm a writer who edits... this project is genuinely interesting and i'm curious to see where it goes. i would try to market it as ML instead of AI, given the current temperature of AI in publishing and writing circles. if somebody can improve upon track changes in a git-like, narrative-tree way, then that might be super useful tool!
I think we're both looking for the same improvements and I haven't found them in a writing tool yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49331036
Yeah many are trying to solve this. It's really not easy to get the UX right. Git changes can get deep and wide
I wanted to have a simple way to navigate my story in a tree form but cli is really not great in displaying those. Lazygit is the best imo but still not great. WebUIs are not really better
Looms seem to work a bit better, which is also what 1667 is based on. But still I don't know needs work
https://cyborgism.wiki/hypha/loom
Yeah I noticed that my god. I regret even posting it. I'm suddenly getting a lot of weird mail I'm not used to hate like that.
What type of hate are you getting if you don't mind me asking?
I like your tool by the way, I don't understand what sort of person would have such visceral hate towards someone's creation.
They don't have to use it but it is nice for you to share your creation.
Don't be put off by them, they actually secretly use LLMs for their own work and they are embarrassed of putting it out there to protect their own 'programmer' ego.
Keep going!
Got 4 emails in my email inbox. I suspect all from the same guy. Weird rants about how ai is going to eat peoples brains how I'm going to hell and calling me a bunch of nasty names. Probably not wrong but you know he could have said it nicer.
Removed the email address from the homepage just in case.
Appreciate your reply thank you.
This sucks. Sorry. If you can't write on your own, don't write at all. Extremely disappointed that anyone is giving this votes.
There are some good use cases, personal fiction, etc. The issue is mostly people not disclaiming it’s AI. I can’t get mad at the tool builder. Neither can I assume the worse of every user.
That being said, I wouldn’t have published something like this because I do assume the worse.
But it’s morally wrong to assume every one lacks honesty…
Tough one
I just fundamentally disagree with this. On one hand, sure, you can argue that there is no direct harm caused by using LLMs to generate fiction for personal consumption. But on the other hand, I feel like there is a deep spiritual deadening that arises when we no longer must engage with the works of others to find fiction that satisfies our tastes. You have niche interests? What you want to read doesn't exist in a meaningful quantity or even at all? Great! You should write it! But you should do so yourself rather than asking a computer to regress your great idea to the mean.
Is it SillyTavern but TUI or is the flow different? I know SillyTavern is more dialogue focused, but surely it can be configured for novel writing instead?
Not sure why you're getting so much hate. Internet is already chock-full of slop, a new TUI-based tool is not going to make it measurably worse.
Yes. But SillyTavern didn't work for me.
I didn't like the character focused chat interaction. You can configure it for novel writing.
The way it treats alternate takes feels wrong to me. It's not branching off of alternates if you know what I mean.
As for the hate I think it's because I called it AI writing tool that brings is a crowd that I really didn't want to address or ever envision as users.
Love the style! very creative
Thank you. I added different themes but I liked this one the best
Can we get a tool that does the opposite for the readers?
What do you mean? Can you elaborate?
Great UI
I assume the several comments complementing the style of this app are being sarcastic, because.. come on..
My god. I'm getting anxiety. I shouldn't have posted this
I like seeing what people create, and you've created something with some interesting features, particularly around the path map and keeping all drafts. I'm forever duplicating a paragraph and rewording it 6 or 7 times, then deleting the rest - and the next day think "no try #2 was better than the one I kept".
Ignore the haters, they're a HN rite of passage. Good luck with your writing!
Thank you. Really appreciate it. Makes me feel better.
Yeah I spent a lot of time thinking about this problem. Wanted to make it easy to navigate multiple takes and multiple branches.
It's a difficult UX problem. I feel like the path view of the map works reasonably well but tree/mass not so much. Needs more thinking
I think you've built some awesome. Even if, as you said, it proves to be for an audience of one (you), I know some people out there are grateful for you sharing it. Comments are not reality most of the times. There is a silent portion which would like your idea and you just don't know. People here in HN tend to be very polarized towards a certain idea, come up with intellectual arguments to justify their emotional reactions. Of course you can find some light in negative comments, but still, to be taken with a grain of salt.
Someone said "a generation growing up without imagining. So depressing." This reads like old man yells to clouds. Through history you can find these comments about upcoming generations all over the place... We can make the same arguments in the past "oh you spend so much time reading others stories instead of writing your own? Yeah, you lack imagination kid, you're in big trouble."
To have nuance and avoid over-generalizing is a good exercise in today's society I guess.
Thank you. I didn't think this would be so controversial. A few people are in my email inbox with nasty comments. I've removed my email from the website. I'm not used such visceral hate.
Anyway I have children myself. They play, they write, they draw. And occasionally we do tech stuff like this. I use it as a choose-your-own-adventure with them. We also make up our own stories for bedtime. I don't see these things as exclusive
Don't worry, the west coast comes online in a couple hours -- they will be positive.
I'm sorry you're getting the lash end of the whip. The rage against the (literal) machine is very high right now. I appreciate you sharing your creativity, and frankly, I am taking notes on what you've built for a related but different project.
Don't forget Hacker News is known for amazing commentary like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
haha thank you. Would love to see your project. I could use a few fresh ideas myself
To those on HN that are hating on this, why?
There isn't even any tracking or account setup with the OP's software?
I'm curious if you have your own creation that doesn't use LLMs at all that you think everyone can benefit from?
We should encourage people to create software even if they use AI to help them.
Calling something 'slop' without any further arguments or constructive criticism for the OP isn't in the spirit of HN.
The reaction is not because the OP used AI to create software.
The reaction is because OP's software facilitates the outsourcing of creative writing to a agentic content mill, and many HN users take issue with that.
This is embarrassing. If you actually created this for your 'own fiction work' you've missing the entire point of writing fiction.
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