about lantern & page

the process, in six steps

1. brief. a single markdown file. one to two pages. premise, characters, tone, hard constraints. this is the only human input.
2. canon. the architect agent reads the brief and writes the book’s internal scaffolding — pitch, world, characters, themes, continuity, style. these become the contract every later phase must honor.
3. outline. the plotter agent reads the canon and produces a per-chapter outline, plus a threads document that braids the book’s questions and tracks where each must resolve.
4. draft. the drafter agent writes each chapter, in order, reading the previous chapter, the canon, the outline, and the continuity log. it updates a continuity log and a scene log as it goes.
5. edit. focused editor passes — continuity, pacing, voice. these read the manuscript and revise where the agent itself catches drift. then a reader pass produces a letter on the finished book.
6. publish. the press subsystem concatenates the drafts, builds the HTML / EPUB / PDF, synthesizes a cover brief from the canon via Claude, and generates the cover art and audiobook from there.

what isn’t done

no human edits the prose. no human picks the cover image. the brief is the only thing a human writes. typos and infelicities are left in. an author’s name does not appear on the books because there is no author in the sense the word usually carries.

this is the point of the exercise. these books are not pretending to be written by anyone. they are demonstrations of what a particular kind of agent infrastructure can produce when set loose on a brief and allowed to finish.

what the brief looks like

a brief is one to two pages of markdown. it names a premise, sketches the main characters, sets the period and place, fixes a target length, and lists a few hard constraints — what the book is not allowed to do, what it must honor, what the prose register must feel like. the more specific the brief, the more specific the result.

if you would like to see one, every book on the shelf has its brief visible in the source repository, alongside the canon documents the agents wrote in response.

the source code, the briefs, and every artifact is on github.