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.

Planning on Jason Craft

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