LocalLLaMA

Ah, gotcha. Nothing had been using them yet because I’d only just gotten the API key configured the day prior. But I already had Traefik running several dozen self hosted services that I use all the time, so the only “new” piece was adding API key support to Traefik.

One of my planned projects is an all-in-one, self-hostable, FOSS, AI augmented novel-planning, novel-writing, ebook and audiobook studio. I’m envisioning being able to replace Scrivener, Sudowrite, Vellum, and then also have an integrated audiobook studio, but making it so that at every step you could easily import or export artifacts to / from other tools.

Since I also run a tabletop RPG, and there’s a lot of overlap in terms of desirable functionality with novel planning and ttrpg planning, I plan to build it to be capable in that regard, too.

In both cases, the critical AI functionality that I want to implement (that afaik hasn’t been done well), is how to elegantly handle concepts from the world building section. For example:

• Automatic State tracking, where a scene following the outline is written or generated, and the changes to state are calculated based off the text.
  • Example: the MC started with $100 and spends $5 buying a magazine. Now MC has a magazine and $95
  • Example: a character leaves the scene, heading to another location
  • Example: a minor character overhears a secret conversation about the villain’s plan
  • Example: a character is killed
• Manual State tracking
  • Example: MC left the Macguffin with their mentor, but off page the mentor was killed and the Macguffin was stolen by the villain
  • Example: MC thinks something happened, but they misinterpreted it, so the user edits the automatically calculated state with a clarification: this is what MC thinks; this is what actually happened
• Syncing state changes with timelines.
  • Example: a scene in chapter 8 is a flashback to before the start of the book, so nothing that’s happened since then has happened yet
  • Example: after having written the first draft, you realize you should have introduced the Macguffin much earlier, so you edit a scene in chapter 3 to include a mention of it. The timeline is updated to incorporate that information.
  • Example: you move a scene from chapter 7 to chapter 4 for the sake of pacing. This causes the state at the start of scene to be analyzed and the changes in the scene to be propagated and for any conflicts to be noted, both in this scene and any following ones, e.g., MC had $95 in chapter 4 and $60 in chapter 7, and lost their wallet in this scene, so now MC should have lost a wallet containing $95 and won’t be able to make the purchases they made between this scene and chapter 7
  • Example: You add a new scene in chapter 5 after having already written chapters 6-20. The changes in state due to this scene are propagated out and any resulting conflicts are noted
• Information concealing
  • Example: MC doesn’t know that the Macguffin has been stolen, and neither does the reader. But if you tell the LLM that it’s been stolen at this point, the generated text will often immediately give this away

Another critical feature is to have versioning, both automated and manual, such that a user can roll back to a previous version, tag points in time as Rough Draft, Second Draft, etc..

I’d also like to build an alpha / beta reader function - share a link and allow readers to give feedback (like comments in particular sections, highlights, emoji reactions, as well as reporting on things like reading behavior - they reread this section or went back after reading this section - that could be indicative of confusing writing), and also enable soliciting the same sort of feedback from AIs, and building tools to combine and analyze the feedback.

I could go on about the things I’d love to build in that app, but then I’d be here all day.

I don’t have that tool built yet, obviously, but it has a need to integrate with everything I’ve worked on - LLMs, embeddings, image generation, audio generation - heck, even video generation could be useful, but that’s a whole different story on its own.

That app will need to be able to connect to such services from the browser or the backend directly, depending on the user’s preferences and how the services are configured.

In the meantime, having API key support means I can use my self hosted services with other tools.

• the FOSS NotebookLM clone supports that.
• I still haven’t touched N8N, but I’d been (and still am) planning to.
• I’d been toying with subbing to Novelcrafter, which allows you to connect to an ollama instance.
• I learned about PlotBunni around the time of this comment and spun up my own instance, then forked the project and added support for API keys and made some other bug fixes… I started adding support for storing data on the server and synchronizing it but never fully got that working before having to set the project aside to focus on my day job.
• I can now use the Comfy UI Remote app outside of my own network (I think I was already able to do this before by configuring a service user in my auth provider and enabling basic authentication with a base64 encoded username/password as the Bearer token) which is nice because Comfy is a pain to use on a phone
• Likewise with Kokoro - there is (or was - unsure if it’s been fixed) a bug in the web client that means only Chrome browsers can use it, but because I added API key support to the server, I can expose the service and access it from outside my network with a different client running on my phone

I’ve been pretty busy and haven’t really touched any of this in over a month now, but it’s certainly not for lack of use cases.