Soundingboard v2.0.0 Release: The Sovereign Author

Soundingboard v2.0.0 Release Notes

Release Date: September 15, 2026
Codename: The Sovereign Author
Compatibility: Node.js $\ge$ 18.0.0 (Zero external runtime dependencies)

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Welcome to Soundingboard 2.0

Soundingboard 2.0 is a complete architectural and philosophical reimagining of the novel engineering console.

Most writing tools and AI assistants suffer from two fatal flaws: they try to force novelists into rigid, linear conveyor belts, and they treat AI as a "ghostwriter" that flattens prose, homogenizes voice, and executes black-box rewrites.

Soundingboard 2.0 inverts this relationship completely.

The author is the novelist. The system bends to the author, never the author to the system.
The human author always holds the red pen. The AI never unilaterally rewrites author prose.

Whether you draft in Obsidian, Scrivener, Microsoft Word, iA Writer, or raw markdown, Soundingboard serves as your Executive Novel Assistant, Master Librarian, Continuity Sentry, and Diagnostic Partner—protecting your voice, guarding your continuity, and organizing your manuscript at your pace.

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Major Highlights & New Features

1. The Writer's Room & Inviolable Immunity Shield (writers_room/)

• Creative Sandbox: A dedicated space partitioned into writers_room/notes/, writers_room/beats/, writers_room/drafts/, and writers_room/inputs/.
• The Immunity Shield: Automated linters, diagnostic scans, continuity checkers, and test runners strictly ignore writers_room/. You can brainstorm half-formed ideas, jot bullet fragments, and draft messy first takes without automated nag screens or red ink.
• On-Demand Assistance: Linters and diagnostics only inspect raw drafts when you explicitly invoke them by file path.

2. Scene-Atomic Architecture & Flexible Chapter Playlists

• The Scene as Dramatic Quantum: All graduated scenes live in a flat, unified pool (manuscript/scenes/sc-XXXX.md). You can write your climax first, jump to an argument in Act II, or draft standalone vignettes.
• Floating & Unassigned Scenes: Scenes do not require immediate chapter assignment. Unassigned scenes remain fully indexed, audited, and valid in your story model.
• Chapter Assembly Playlists (manuscript/chapters/ch-XX.md): Chapters are decoupled from file hierarchies. A chapter is a flexible playlist referencing scenes in reading order, complete with an authored break_rationale.
• Lossless Derived Caching: manuscript.json is a purely derived cache rebuilt losslessly via node scripts/soundingboard.js reindex. Markdown files remain the sole ground truth.

3. Multi-Pathway Frontmatter Assistance & Scene Graduation (Playbook #19)

• Zero Frontmatter Overhead: Drafting in the Writer's Room requires zero YAML.
• Three Graduation Pathways: When you are ready to graduate a draft to the manuscript pool:
  • Path 1 (AI Inference): The assistant reads your draft and proposes POV, location, value shifts, and five commandments for your approval.
  • Path 2 (Author Scaffold): The assistant injects a clean frontmatter template with in-world suggestions from your bible and threads commented inline.
  • Path 3 (Conversational Discovery): The assistant interviews you in chat about the turning point and dramatic stakes, then generates the block.
• CLI Graduation: Run node scripts/soundingboard.js graduate <draft-path> to automatically assign a canonical sc-XXXX ID, index the scene, and harvest new proper nouns into canon.md.

4. The Bracket Method & The Linter Bracket Workflow (Playbooks #18 & #20)

• Elimination of Black-Box Rewrites: The assistant will never perform silent or wholesale rewrites of your prose to clear a linter warning or satisfy an audit.
• The Bracket Workflow: Stylistic diagnostics, AI tell scans, and rhythm variance checks quarantine suggestions in bracketed annotations ([AI-TELL: ...], [CADENCE: ...]) alongside your verbatim prose, providing 3 clear choices:
  1. Cut the friction.
  2. Rephrase using 2–3 voice-preserving options.
  3. Keep as intentional author voice.

5. Root Author Preferences Profile (preferences.md)

• A centralized profile at workspace root establishing your working rhythm:
  • working_mode: solo (100% human prose; AI is Librarian/Sentry), hybrid (collaborative beat brainstorms), or agentic (explicit on-demand drafting).
  • primary_editor: obsidian, word, scrivener, ia_writer, or any.
  • ai_prose_generation: "never" (default for solo), "on_demand", or "collaborative".
  • editorial_style: "bracket_options", "coaching_notes", or "minimalist".
  • tell_tolerance: strict, moderate, or permissive.

6. Sub-500ms Diagnostics & Narrative Authenticity Engine

• Scene-Scoped Scans (soundingboard audit): Analyzes scenes in milliseconds for lexical tell density (normalized per 1,000 words), sentence rhythm variance (preventing monotone pacing), and emotional mode progression.
• Chapter-Scoped Audits (soundingboard chapter-audit): Evaluates multi-scene cadence shifts and tests the efficacy of chapter breaks against the authored break_rationale.
• Commandments Advisory Audit (soundingboard commandments): Advises on Shawn Coyne's 5 Commandments of Storytelling (Inciting Incident, Progressive Complication, Crisis Question, Climax, Resolution).
• Voice Anchors: Enforces same-POV voice anchor resolution so scene tone matches established character perspectives.

7. Thread Diagnostics & Interactive Lane Visualizer

• Subplot Health (soundingboard threads): Tracks character arcs, mystery spines, and relationship subplots.
• Orphan Guard: Detects and flags scenes that lack narrative thread linkage.
• Dormancy Tracker: Monitors cumulative word counts between thread appearances to eliminate forgotten subplots.
• Visualizer (Terminal + HTML): Generates instant ASCII thread timelines in the terminal and a zero-dependency, interactive HTML dashboard (thread_lanes.html) with SVG trajectory lanes and multi-thread braid points.

8. Cascading Canon 2.0 & Decision Queues (soundingboard canon)

• Epistemic Provenance Tracking: Links world facts to the exact scene that establishes them.
• Spoiler Threshold Guard: Suppresses future lore when drafting or auditing earlier scenes.
• Three Epistemic Gap Queues:
  • Orphaned Facts Queue: Identifies canon entries whose establishing scene was cut.
  • Unbound Entities Queue: Detects recurring proper nouns in prose not yet recorded in canon.
  • Unverified Queue: Tracks draft-harvested entities pending author verification.

9. Multi-Tier Manuscript Publishing Compiler (soundingboard compile)

• Flexible Assembler: Compiles chapter playlists and flat scenes into clean, publication-grade output.
• Configurable Scene Dividers: Supports customizable break glyphs (--break="***", --break=blank, --break=line, --break="~ ~ ~").
• Multi-Format Export: Emits semantic, typographically styled HTML out of the box, with automated EPUB and Microsoft Word (.docx) exports via Pandoc.
• Fail-Loud Verification: Instantly halts with descriptive errors if a referenced scene is missing from disk.

10. Soundingboard Model Health Console & Doctor

• Health Console (soundingboard status): Real-time telemetry dashboard covering chapter inventories, missing rationales, null value shifts, provisional voice anchors, and diagnostic SHA-256 staleness.
• Concierge Auto-Healing (soundingboard doctor --fix): Verifies Node environment, path tracking, directory structures, and git health backstage.
• Cold-Start Briefing (soundingboard brief): Dense context packet providing immediate orientation for AI craft partners without context bloat.

11. OKF Craft Card Knowledge Base

• 118 Standardized Craft Modules: Comprehensive craft wisdom spanning Story Grid, Save the Cat!, Truby, and Sanderson.
• Structural Scopes: Categorized into scene, chapter, manuscript, and sentence scopes.
• Instant Search: soundingboard craft search <query> [--scope=...] [--genre=...].

12. Git Playbook & Creative History (soundingboard git, Playbook #21)

• The Sovereign Author Rule: Soundingboard files contain the meaning. Git records the evolution.
• Git as a Transparent Historical Layer: Git is an open historical record over your file-first workspace, never a competing database.
• Author Ownership & Control: Commits and pushes occur only when the author says to or authorizes. The AI never commits or pushes behind your back.
• Author Git Modes (preferences.md): Choose between gentle (default, milestone suggestions with rationale), quiet (no prompts), guided (full diff summaries), and automatic. Remote pushes are separately controlled (ask by default).
• Separation of Technical Integrity from Creative Uncertainty: Malformed YAML, duplicate scene IDs, and broken references warn/block to protect the workspace, while creative critiques (pacing, AI tells, motivations) never block commits or pushes.
• Stable Scene Identity: Moving scenes between chapters alters playlist arrays in manuscript/chapters/ch-XX.md; scene files (manuscript/scenes/sc-XXXX.md) and their YAML context remain unbroken.
• Context Packer & Tooling: Dedicated commands for status (soundingboard git status), integrity check (soundingboard git verify), checkpoints (soundingboard git checkpoint), remote checks (soundingboard git push-check), branch experiment comparisons (soundingboard git compare), and context packing (soundingboard pack git).

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Zero Runtime Dependencies

Soundingboard 2.0 maintains a strict zero runtime dependency standard (dependencies: {} in package.json). Everything runs purely on native Node.js 18+ built-ins (fs, path, crypto, child_process).

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Quick Reference CLI Cheatsheet

Task	Command
Initialize workspace	node scripts/soundingboard.js init [dir] [--form]
Model Health console	node scripts/soundingboard.js status
Fast context brief	node scripts/soundingboard.js brief
Creative history & Git	node scripts/soundingboard.js git status
Rebuild index cache	node scripts/soundingboard.js reindex
Graduate a draft	node scripts/soundingboard.js graduate <file>
Scan scene for AI tells	node scripts/soundingboard.js audit [file]
Audit chapter cadence	node scripts/soundingboard.js chapter-audit [ch]
Audit 5 commandments	`node scripts/soundingboard.js commandments [sc
Check thread subplots	node scripts/soundingboard.js threads [--view]
Query canon & queues	node scripts/soundingboard.js canon query "<q>" / check
Compile manuscript	node scripts/soundingboard.js compile [--epub] [--docx]
Environment health	node scripts/soundingboard.js doctor [--fix]
Search craft cards	node scripts/soundingboard.js craft search "<query>"

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Upgrade Guide from 1.x

Upgrading from Soundingboard 1.x is automatic and non-destructive:

1. Existing Projects: Legacy chapter directories (manuscript/ch-01/sc-0001.md) continue to be indexed and compiled seamlessly.
2. Opt-In Flat Pool: To migrate to the 2.0 playlist model, simply run node scripts/soundingboard.js reindex.
3. Preferences: Create or seed a root preferences.md file to configure your working mode.