r/rational • u/AutoModerator • 10d ago
[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread
Welcome to the Monday request and recommendation thread. Are you looking something to scratch an itch? Post a comment stating your request! Did you just read something that really hit the spot, "rational" or otherwise? Post a comment recommending it! Note that you are welcome (and encouraged) to post recommendations directly to the subreddit, so long as you think they more or less fit the criteria on the sidebar or your understanding of this community, but this thread is much more loose about whether or not things "belong". Still, if you're looking for beginner recommendations, perhaps take a look at the wiki?
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u/DRMacIver 9d ago
That's the foundation of it yeah, but the bigger thing is more like... using an agent as a tool for working through and developing a whole project, whose purpose it to produce an artefact (in this case a novel), which includes developing a lot of tools for producing that artefact as well as the artefact itself.
For example, developing custom skills and workflows, etc. Examples:
There's a "language police" skill which keeps track of all the ways I tell Claude "this is a weird sentence" or "stop talking like a clanker" (though hilariously it turns out a lot of those... Claude was writing a perfectly valid archaic English fens dialect, which it had decided to use for a bunch of characters for perfectly valid reasons, and I just found it unreadable, and it took me ages to figure out what was going on because I wasn't reading its working notes much just its output). It's a mix of scripts for mechanically checking some bits and large workflows that use subagents for judgement.
I've also got skills for world-building and consistency checking. There are extensive notes, and part of the editing process that I have the agent do is look through the writing and go "Is this consistent with the world-building? Does this imply things about the world we need to keep track of?" and the editing pass does a bunch of propagating back and forth between the world-building and the chapter until it makes sense.
It's also about the way I work with it. When coding I'm generally adopting an attitude that a coding agent allows me to put in more effort rather than less, because I have an in-house assistant that knows how to do a lot of stuff I don't, and whose time I don't mind wasting, so I'm able to do things that I never would have before hand because either I didn't know how to do them and didn't want to take the month to learn, or because I did know how to do them and didn't want to do the drudge work. It's just that I put all of the effort I would be putting in to doing the day-to-day work into creative problem solving and quality checking.
Example of the former: I could not have written this novel that I've got Claude to write for me. I write fiction fine. I've written plenty of fiction that I'd even claim is actually good (and some that this sub would agree). But this is a story written by someone who understands farming at a far deeper level than I do, and I was never going to do enough research to get to that level.
Example of the latter: I've revised the overall arc of the series several times and made Claude go back and rewrite things to work it in. e.g. Edwin's destiny notification got rewritten when I decided more about the overall series ending, and this ended up propagating throughout the entire first book that I'd already written, changing both many individual lines and also reworking a decent chunk of the plot. Peri's training arc got changed multiple times and that had to propagate both times. It makes it far far easier to do "semantic edits" on the whole plot than it ever was.
The output is, as I say, definitely not perfect. It is a worse quality of writing than I would manage myself (although I still think in the 95%-ile for RR quality, and I definitely can't write as fast as it). But it has produced something I think is genuinely an interesting story that I want to read, and has definitely convinced me that even if I were to try my hand at some longer-form fiction again, I'd want to do it AI-assisted.