nuncaeslupus/literary-critic

Tooling that lets an LLM work through a full novel manuscript as a professional
editor would — and that keeps working across many chat sessions and drafts.
1. **Index** — turn the manuscript into stable anchors (part → chapter → scene →
paragraph) and a Codex — a knowledge base of scenes, characters, places,
facts, setups/payoffs and findings, each tied to its text — so the LLM can
find and relate anything without loading the whole book.
2. **Analyse** — run a generic catalogue of checks (structure, characters, plot,
scenes, POV, prose, dialogue, continuity, …), adapted to each novel, with
evidence anchored to the text and script-measured metrics wherever possible.
3. **Advise** — produce prioritised, concrete revision actions in rounds
(structural first, then scene, then line level), track their status, re-index
the next draft and measure what changed.
For novelists, and the editors who work with them, who want an LLM's reading of
a whole manuscript without handing it the pen. In Claude Code:
Status: early development. See status/specification.md and status/plan.md.
Documents are read and written through
doc-control, which owns the generic
document work (paragraph addresses, chapters and scenes, diff, locating,
edits with a backup, comments, undo). literary-critic owns the literary side: the
index, the Codex, the checks, letters and revision rounds. See
docs/architecture.md.
How it is used
| Where | How |
|-------|-----|
| Claude Code (local or cloud) | Clone, open, talk. Scripts run directly. |
| Claude (desktop app with Cowork, or Claude.ai) | Add the literary-critic Skill once (lc kit --skill builds the zip to upload in Claude's settings, under Skills), then say "I want to use literary-critic for my novel". |
| Chat with code execution (ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Gemini) | Upload the kit zip (lc kit builds it; the assistant reads its START_HERE.md) and your workspace zip; the assistant runs the scripts and returns an updated workspace zip. |
| Chat without code execution | Paste the portable prompts from prompts/; reduced mode without metrics. |
**What you need for the full experience** (the novel's folder connected, changes
written into the file with a backup, Word opened at the right paragraph): Claude's
desktop app with Cowork, which needs a paid Claude plan and a Mac with Apple
silicon or Windows Pro, Enterprise or Education. On the free plan, Windows Home
or an Intel Mac there is no Cowork: the tool works in basic mode, where you
upload the manuscript and get back a commented copy.
Your novel and all working files live in a **workspace folder outside this