Claude-Code on Jason Craft

Co-Writing a Novel With an Agent: Style Engineering

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

LLM-generated text has some well-documented tics you’ve probably noticed. You might just understand them subconsciously, although nowadays there are memes that call them out. By default, the prose is passable, if not inspiring. It’s also weirdly uniform, and it has habits.

This is the third post in a series about co-writing a “meganovel” (targeting 1,000,000 words or more) with an AI agent. The first covers the context management infrastructure. The second covers the collaboration model and planning process. This one is about the output itself: what’s wrong with the robot’s prose defaults, and the system I’ve built to fight them.

Co-Writing a Novel With an Agent: The Showrunner Model

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second post in a series about the systems I’ve built to co-write a “meganovel” (targeting 1,000,000 words or more) with an AI agent. The first post covers the context management problem and the search/MCP tooling I built to solve it. This one is about how we plan together, how I think about the collaboration, and the architectural contract that keeps the robot from surfacing things it shouldn’t.

If you’ve used an agentic coding tool, you probably have picked up the flow of gathering context, building a structured understanding of the problem, producing a spec, then letting the agent execute autonomously from the spec. I use the same process to write chapters of a novel. The “problem” is a chapter. The “spec” is a beat sheet with dialogue intent and character notes. It’s a little more fun than a software spec (although some engineers might say the opposite), but it’s more the same than not.

Co-Writing a Novel With an Agent: Context Management at Scale

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been writing a novel with Claude for three months. The manuscript and supporting materials total over 626,000 words across 31 sequences and 200 files. (Which means I left behind both Infinite Jest and War and Peace word counts a little while ago.) I have enough plot runway to get to 1,000,000 words, easy, and I plan to keep going from there.¹ There are 50 reference documents, 12 scaffolding files, and 716 commits. The agent generates the prose. I provide the creative vision and plan the narrative. Together, we edit the output and build the systems that make generation possible.

Agentic Development: All In

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For the past five months, I’ve been co-leading development of an enterprise platform where nearly 100% of the code is written by AI coding agents. This isn’t POC or experiment mode. We’re adopting agent generation as a production engineering practice for a first-class product.

We were lucky in our timing. The models keep getting meaningfully better: September 2025, November, again this year. It feels like we started at the point right when the models became viable for this sort of operation. We aren’t vibe coding and we’re not hand-writing with autocomplete. It’s a different relationship between the engineer and the code.