[sxp]

> I'd quite like a tool (running entirely locally on my own hardware, with no cloud service and no copyright-thieving grifters making bank on it via subscription fees) that digests a manuscript and derives a scene-by-scene timeline, that I could then query interactively and use to plan my next round of edits. Being able to map out where and when each protagonist and minor character shows up, and see a frequency distribution heat map of names in the manuscript, would be useful.

Interestingly enough, I do this with various books I'm reading. E.g, I'm currently rereading Accelerando and had Claude generate a wiki-like timeline of key events, characters, and salient plot points. That makes it easier to jump around when I want to re-read a section and grok a plot thread that is scattered across chapters. Ironically, it also exposes inconsistencies (or "hallucinations" as some might call them) in the text because the author didn't have an AI proofread the text.

[bitexploder]

You could build a tool like that and on a MBP with 48+ GB of RAM all of that can happen locally in terms of keeping your content locally. I am sort of an outliner and planner and I heavily use AI when writing documents for work. I don't see why fiction / prose would be any different? Indexing your content with a vector RAG and having a little 27B model locally could do everything he wants with some help from a big model to implement it all. It sounds like a weekend of coding for a functional prototype to me.

[rahimnathwani]

He doesn't want to use a model trained on someone else's text. So he would need to train a model from scratch. I don't know whether his own texts would provide enough data.

[bitexploder]

Oh… definitely not enough text. LLMs don’t work like that. Hmm.

[magicalist]

> Ironically, it also exposes inconsistencies (or "hallucinations" as some might call them) in the text because the author didn't have an AI proofread the text.

That's not irony, or even cute. He's literally describing a tool he'd like to use to plan edits to his writing.

[derektank]

Are you able to share? Both your process and the specific timeline for Accelerando. I would love to build one for A Fire Upon the Deep

[sxp]

I'm not going to share because https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. But I've paid for my copy of the book so I can do what I want with it.

If you want to build your own, you can feed this DESIGN.md to your favorite clankie: https://pastebin.com/huRkGnba