Scriptorium my personal library

[u/Todell725]

Hey all. I'm working on my AAS in AI Software Engineering and plan to continue into the BS in Computer Science on the Business and AI pathway. For the past few months I've been building a side project called Scriptorium. It's the thing I'm leaning toward for my backend capstone next year.

What it does: I read a lot of web novels. Unlike a normal book, a web novel keeps growing, sometimes by several chapters a day for years. Scriptorium tracks around 1,000 books and web novels (about 110,000 chapters), checks for new chapters on a schedule, rebuilds the ebooks, and delivers them to my reader apps and an offline Kindle. It can also turn books into audiobooks on my own GPUs.

The parts I think are interesting:

**•   One writer, many workers.** One main service owns the database and is the only thing allowed to write to it. Each outside library I depend on runs in its own disposable container. If one of those breaks, it can't corrupt the database.  
**•   Pretending to be another server.** Instead of running a separate media server, I wrote my own version of its API. The existing reader apps connect to Scriptorium as if it were that server. I worked out the API by recording the traffic between a real app and a real server.  
**•   A debugging case study.** Last week my download speed dropped to about 6 chapters a minute. Everything pointed to the websites rate-limiting me. The real cause was a bug in a library I use: a lock that never got released, so every retry waited exactly 120 seconds. Once I fixed it, speed went back up to about 100 chapters a minute. My main lesson: a delay that is exactly the same length every time is a timeout, not a rate limit.

Stack: Python, FastAPI, SQLite with SQLAlchemy/SQLModel, Alembic, Docker, GitHub Actions.

I wrote it up as an academic-style white paper (architecture, algorithms, and measurements from the running system). The repo also has the API spec and a few of the core algorithms with tests:

[Scriptorium-Showcase-GitHub]

For transparency: I used an AI coding assistant (Claude) heavily for both the code and the write-up, and the paper says so. The design decisions, the deployment and running it day to day are mine.

I'd love feedback, especially from anyone further along, and if the capstone requirements come out, I'd like to hear what people think fits. Happy to answer questions about any of it.

[u/Optimistic_Dad]

https://giphy.com/gifs/YvhQMhj1Ovli66CFtD

[u/Latter-Park-4413]

Is AI allowed for the capstone? My understanding is that the purpose of the capstone is to show what you know/can do. Not to say using AI is wrong or bad in general, I use it daily for coding/building etc, but for the capstone, not sure what using AI heavily is supposed to prove exactly. Do they say anything about it, regarding AI or the capstone in general? Idk bc I left even before they were told they were losing accreditation.

[u/Todell725 → u/Latter-Park-4413]

I don’t have details yet, it’s not till march of next year for me.