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Show HN: 1667, a terminal UI for writing fiction with language models

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Re: Show HN: 1667, a terminal UI for writing fiction with language models

#61

Post by arecsu »

refsab wrote: post #42
pbowyer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Show HN: 1667, a terminal UI for writing fiction with language models

#62

Post by barbazoo »

thegagne wrote: post #37

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 broad…

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.

Re: Show HN: 1667, a terminal UI for writing fiction with language models

#63

Post by refsab »

thegagne wrote: post #37

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 broad…

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

Re: Show HN: 1667, a terminal UI for writing fiction with language models

#64

Post by gabriel666smith »

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!

Re: Show HN: 1667, a terminal UI for writing fiction with language models

#65

Post by api »

refsab wrote: post #34
bubblegumcrisis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Show HN: 1667, a terminal UI for writing fiction with language models

#67

Post by refsab »

0gs wrote: post #55
thegagne wrote: post #37

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 broad…

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

Re: Show HN: 1667, a terminal UI for writing fiction with language models

#68

Post by newsy-combi »

refsab wrote: post #10
DC-3 wrote: post #5

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.

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.

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.

Re: Show HN: 1667, a terminal UI for writing fiction with language models

#69

Post by refsab »

drbscl wrote: post #60
refsab wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Show HN: 1667, a terminal UI for writing fiction with language models

#70

Post by dbspin »

dbspin wrote: post #43

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 a…

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...

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