[JeremySNR]

Summary

Quillgon can now write true stories (a life story or a memoir) as well as novels. In this mode the AI works like a professional ghostwriter: it interviews the author, drafts the chapters itself, and goes back and forth with them on revisions. Dictation works across the whole app, novels included. The research and design behind this is in docs/life-stories-and-dictation.md.

Dictation

• There is a mic in every prose editor, margin note and answer box. Hold Alt D to talk.
• Speech is recorded in the app at 16 kHz and split at pauses.
• It is transcribed by OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-transcribe, local whisper.cpp (QUILLGON_WHISPER_CMD / QUILLGON_WHISPER_MODEL), or an offline placeholder.
• The book's names (people, places) are sent to the recogniser so it spells them right.
• A small scribe agent tidies the transcript. If the tidy-up adds a name or rewrites a sentence, the raw words are kept instead.
• New Settings → Voice tab. On macOS: a microphone entitlement and usage string.

Life-story books

• Book type: Book.kind is now novel, life-story or memoir, with life settings (subject, born, audience, who holds the pen).
• New data: stories, sessions, a question queue, a ghostwriter's notebook, and margin notes anchored in the text.
• Navigation: the sidebar changes for these books. Novel-only tools (twists, plot points) are hidden.

Interview sessions (engine.interviews, ghostwriter agent)

• Each session starts with an agenda that gives a reason for each item.
• The ghostwriter asks one open question at a time and labels the technique it uses.
• Each story moves up a ladder: what happened, one particular time, who was there, senses, what was said, how it felt then, what it means now.
• What the author says is filed into people, stories, the timeline and questions as changes that can be undone.
• Another speaker's account is kept as their own version.

Chapters (engine.life)

• The ghostwriter proposes the book's shape, and each chapter has its own stage: Gathering, Ready, Draft, Your notes, Revising, Approved.
• Chapter 1 is the voice sample.
• Drafts are written from the stories only. Margin notes cover gaps, two tellings that disagree, thin passages, voice choices and sentences with no source.

Revision rounds

• The author gives free-form feedback. The ghostwriter replies with a numbered plan, then per-passage changes to accept or reject.
• It may push back once per point, and the author can overrule it.
• Feedback about the whole book becomes a style rule.
• Each round is one commit. Approving a chapter locks it.

Other screens

• Timeline: shows ages, shades the gaps, and offers "Ask me about these years". Moving a date carries it into the stories and scenes that use it.
• Ghostwriter's notebook: an editable page of what the ghostwriter knows about the author.
• Before you share: claims with no source, open gaps, people who have not agreed to appear, sensitive stories and unapproved chapters. It also writes an author's note that opens the exported book.

CLI and evals

• quillgon init --life | --memoir [--about Name] [--born 1948]
• quillgon session (interviews from the terminal)
• quillgon eval-life uses simulated interviewees with hidden facts (evals/lives.yaml, interviewee agent). It scores facts drawn out, depth, follow-up on surprising answers, refused / leading / off-limits questions, and unsourced sentences.
• pnpm e2e:life

Safeguards

• Questions: code checks every question before the author sees it. Questions that suggest a detail the author never gave (a false-memory risk) are refused, and so are off-limits topics. A refused question gets one retry, then falls back to a safe open question.
• Off the record: these answers are never sent to the model, and nothing from them is filed.
• Drafts: where the material runs out, drafts leave [TK: …] gaps instead of guessing. Every sentence is checked against what the author actually said.
• Quotes: revision edits that would change a quote are refused.
• Microphone: permission is granted only for audio from the app's own origin. Every other permission is still denied.
• Recordings: session audio is kept under audio/ in the book and git-ignored. Transcripts are versioned.

Testing

All of these were run locally on 5ad88d7:

• pnpm lint: 0 errors, the existing 23 warnings
• pnpm typecheck
• pnpm test: 284 passed
• pnpm build
• pnpm scale-check --max-prompt 8000
• pnpm site:build
• pnpm site:check
• scripts/e2e-ui.ts
• scripts/ui-refresh.ts
• scripts/e2e-covers.ts
• scripts/e2e-life.ts: the whole life-story flow in Chromium with a fake microphone
• quillgon eval-life --offline

Everything above uses offline models. The ghostwriter has not been run against a live model yet, so eval-life scores mean nothing until it is.

Not built yet

• Parakeet and other local models beyond whisper.cpp; streaming transcription
• Telling speakers apart automatically
• Family and published editions as branches
• Phone or companion-page interviews; photos as prompts

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01VesxdmVnfJM1sL5RyuQhre

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Generated by Claude Code

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Note

Medium Risk
Large new product surface (interviews, drafts, revisions) with model calls and memory-safety checks; dictation and mic permissions widen the desktop security footprint but are scoped to same-origin audio.

Overview
Adds life-story and memoir books alongside novels: interview sessions with a ghostwriter agent, chapter shaping and staged drafting, margin notes and revision rounds, plus timeline, notebook, and before you share screens. The desktop app gets a life-specific sidebar and routes; novel-only flows (twists, ledger in threads, etc.) step aside when project.life is set.

Adds voice dictation end-to-end: browser recording (segmented long takes), /dictate transcription and tidy-up, mic UI and Alt+D hold-to-talk in editors and session/chat boxes, Settings → Voice, and Electron/macOS microphone permission plus CSP media-src for blobs.

Docs and tooling: large README section, quillgon init --life|--memoir, quillgon session, quillgon eval-life, and pnpm e2e:life. Agent prompts gain life-aware intentBlock and shared-life prompts.

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1 Skipped Deployment

Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated
quillgon	Skipped		Oct 11, 2026 3:42pm UTC

[cursor]

Stale Bugbot comment from a previous run.

[cursor]

Cursor Bugbot has reviewed your changes and found 1 potential issue.

Bugbot Autofix prepared a fix for the issue found in the latest run.

• ✅ Fixed: Answers can be sent twice
  • Added a sending ref lock before awaiting dictation stop, and made stop() share one flush promise so nested callers wait for the last WAV.

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^{Reviewed by Cursor Bugbot for commit a78183d. Configure here.}