Story Computing Machine

A project-local Codex story room for writing short fiction in one shared universe. Give Codex a prompt tagged [WP]; the project instructions route it through canon research, story architecture, drafting, continuity review, and a final edit followed by review of the reader-facing story.

Quick start

1. Open this repository as the Codex workspace.

2. Add known setting facts to universe/ (or ask Codex to help seed them).

3. Start a new task with a prompt such as:

   [WP] Every city has a ghost assigned to it. Tonight, ours resigns.
   Target: about 3,000 words; close third person; melancholy but hopeful.
   

4. Codex creates stories/<story-slug>/ and keeps the prompt, canon brief, plan, draft, review, final story, and proposed canon changes together.

If length, point of view, or tone are omitted, the workflow records reasonable defaults instead of stopping for low-impact questions.

On-demand prompt discovery

Ask Run the prompt scout to have the project inspect the newest 100 previously unscanned [WP] posts from r/WritingPrompts, rank all 100 against the persistent taste profile, and return the best ten. Ask Run the prompt calibrator to get a diverse comparison set drawn from ranks 11–100; ordering that set teaches the scout what should rise or fall in later runs. Neither agent is scheduled.

Prompt rankings, deduplication IDs, feedback, and calibration history live in data/prompt-scout/. Recommendations remain non-canon prompts until separately sent through the story workflow.

Project layout

• AGENTS.md — the project director and non-negotiable workflow rules.
• .codex/agents/ — project-scoped specialist roles Codex can delegate to.
• .agents/skills/ — reusable workflows and their owned supporting scripts.
• data/ — persistent operational state shared by project workflows.
• universe/ — the authoritative shared-universe notes.
• stories/ — one directory per story plus an index and reusable template.

GitHub Pages

The Pages workflow builds a reader site from publishable stories/*/05-story.md files. Its homepage links to every candidate, final, abandoned, or apocryphal story, displays each available [WP] from 00-prompt.md, and separately links to readable historical legacy sources. Legacy pages are retrieved from the exact Git revision recorded in pages/legacy-stories.json, verified against their recorded SHA-256 digests, and clearly labeled as unreviewed adaptation seeds rather than canon. Pull requests validate the build; relevant pushes to main deploy it.

To preview the generated files locally:

python -m pip install --requirement pages/requirements.txt
python pages/build.py --output _site
python -m http.server --directory _site

Canon policy

Universe notes are authoritative. Drafts and plans are never canon. A final story becomes shared-universe canon only after the user explicitly approves its canon promotion; until then, 06-canon-delta.md records proposed additions without silently changing the setting.

Codex detects repo skills automatically. If newly added custom roles do not appear in an already-open task, start a new task or restart Codex.