Chatting with Claude

Writan will integrate with Claude (Anthropic’s AI) to provide intelligent assistance throughout the writing process.

Planned Capabilities

• Brainstorming — Explore ideas, develop characters, work through plot problems
• Story development — Expand beats, develop scenes, explore “what if” scenarios
• Craft feedback — Get analysis grounded in the writing rules engine
• Generation — Produce prose drafts based on your beat notes and data layers

What Exists Today

An API endpoint for prose generation exists at app/api/generate/route.ts, but it is not yet connected to the UI. The endpoint accepts beat notes and story context and returns AI-generated prose using Claude Sonnet.

A context composition system (lib/context/inheritedContext.ts) walks the node tree and collects:

• Ancestor data — characters, locations, objects, freeform blocks from parent nodes
• Sibling context — prior beats’ notes and prose for narrative continuity (configurable depth, cross-scene bridging)
• Structured output — formatted text ordered from Book → Beat

This context system is functional but not yet wired into the generation UI.

Planned Context Composition

When fully connected, the AI will receive a composite of:

• The current node’s data blocks (characters, locations, freeform data)
• Parent node context (scene purpose, chapter arc, act themes)
• Preceding sibling beats (notes and prose, for narrative continuity)
• Beat notes and existing prose
• Writing rules for the task at hand

See How AI Generation Works for the technical details of what exists so far.