alt Hacker News> 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.
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> 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.
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
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.