SMF·NOVELCRAFTER
Can a prompt replace Novelcrafter?
AI writing — grammar, editing and long-form writing
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Verdict
Novelcrafter's actual trick is small and specific: it keeps a codex of characters, places and lore, notices which entries a scene mentions, and quietly assembles them into the context window before the model drafts. That is a matching pass plus a prompt builder, and it is a weekend at most. What takes longer is the manuscript furniture around it — the scene board, the revision history, the export that produces a manuscript an editor will accept — and that is where the weekend becomes a fortnight.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a local novel-drafting app whose defining feature is a codex that injects itself into the drafting prompt.
Data model, in SQLite: a project holds chapters, chapters hold scenes, and a scene holds Markdown text. Alongside that, a codex of entries, each with a type (character, place, object, faction, concept), a canonical name, a list of aliases, a body of notes, and a set of relationships to other entries.
The matching pass is the core. When the user asks for a draft or a continuation of a scene, scan the scene's existing text and its one-line summary for codex names and aliases. Build the prompt from: the project's style notes, the summaries of the two preceding scenes, the full text of the current scene, and the notes of every matched codex entry plus its first-degree relations. Show the assembled context to the user before sending, as a collapsible list of what was included and why, and let them add or remove an entry for this call only. Never send the whole codex; the point is selection.
Drafting actions: continue the scene, rewrite the selection with an instruction, and expand a one-line beat into prose. Insert every result as a suggestion the user accepts, rejects or edits — never write directly into the manuscript.
Manuscript views: a chapter tree with drag-to-reorder, a per-scene status (outline, draft, revised, done), a running word count with a daily target, and a scene board showing point-of-view character and summary as cards.
Export: a single Markdown file, a compiled DOCX with chapter breaks, and a full JSON backup of manuscript plus codex.
Use Anthropic or OpenAI, whichever key is configured. With no key, everything except the three drafting actions must still work — the codex, the manuscript and the export are the parts you cannot afford to lose.
Out of scope: cloud sync, collaboration, any hosted service, and shipping bundled prompt presets. The user writes their own.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 the mature scene board and outlining views built over years of author feedback
- B.2 prompt presets contributed by a community of working novelists
- B.3 sync between a desktop and a laptop mid-manuscript
- B.4 the polish of an editor that never loses a chapter
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: polish, integrations, and proprietary language models
Because at four dollars a month the subscription is cheaper than the evening you would spend rebuilding it, and a manuscript is not the thing you want to be beta-testing your own file format on.
Questions
Can I import my Novelcrafter project?
Partly. Novelcrafter exports the manuscript as Markdown and the codex as a structured file, so scenes and entries come across. Relationships between codex entries and any saved prompts do not map cleanly and need rebuilding by hand.
Which model should I point it at?
For prose continuation the larger models are noticeably better at holding voice, and the difference is worth more here than in most tasks. The codex matching means each call sends a few thousand tokens rather than the whole book, so the cost difference between a small and a large model is smaller than you would expect.
What does it cost to run?
Model calls only. A scene continuation with a handful of codex entries attached is a few thousand tokens in and a few hundred out, so cents. Drafting a full novel this way lands in the tens of dollars, which is roughly a year of the Hobbyist plan.
What is the one thing that does not survive the rebuild?
Working on the same manuscript from two machines. Novelcrafter syncs; this stores a SQLite file on one computer. Putting that file in a sync folder mostly works and occasionally corrupts, which is not a risk worth taking with a manuscript.
Related tools
Receipt