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Guided Buildout

Guided Buildout is an AI-led conversation that walks you through creating a fully structured project from scratch. Describe your story idea, and the AI guides you through eight steps — generating characters, settings, themes, and an outline along the way.

Starting a Buildout​

From the Dashboard, click Guided Buildout to begin. You can also start one from Brainstorm by choosing Guided Buildout as the conversation mode.

The buildout opens with a progress bar at the top showing your current step.

The 8 Steps​

The AI moves through each step in order, proposing artifacts you can accept into your new project:

1. Premise

Describe your story idea in a few sentences. The AI refines it into a clear premise and proposes a project metadata artifact with title, premise, genre, and tone. Accepting this artifact creates your project immediately.

2. Genre & Tone

The AI explores genre expectations and tonal choices — dark vs. light, literary vs. commercial, etc. This step refines the project metadata.

3. Characters

Develop your main cast one by one. The AI proposes character artifacts with name, role, personality, backstory, goals, fears, arc, voice, and quirks. Accept each character to add it to your Story Bible.

4. Settings

Build your world's key locations. The AI proposes setting artifacts with name, type, description, atmosphere, and sensory details.

5. Themes

Identify the central themes of your story. The AI proposes theme artifacts with name, description, and recurring motifs.

6. Style

Establish your narrative voice. The AI proposes a style guide artifact covering POV, tense, tone, and avoidances.

7. Structure

Outline your story's shape. The AI proposes outline act artifacts for the overall structure, and optionally scene beat artifacts for key scenes.

8. Review

The AI summarizes everything you've accepted and confirms your project is ready. The progress bar shows all steps complete.

Artifacts​

Each AI response may include one or more artifact cards — structured proposals for story elements. Every card has two actions:

  • Accept — saves the element to your project (Story Bible, outline, or project settings)
  • Dismiss — skips it without saving

If an artifact shares a name with an existing Story Bible entry, the existing entry is updated rather than duplicated.

Progress Tracking​

The progress bar at the top tracks which steps have at least one accepted artifact. Steps light up as you accept artifacts of the corresponding type (e.g., accepting a character artifact completes the Characters step).

Project Creation​

Your project is created the moment you accept the project metadata artifact in Step 1. A Go to Project button appears in the top bar, linking directly to your new project. All subsequent artifacts are saved into that project.

tip

You don't need to complete all 8 steps to get a usable project. Accept the artifacts you find valuable, skip what you don't need, and build from there in the project editor.

Chat Interface​

The buildout uses the same chat interface as Brainstorm:

  • Type your message and press ⌘Enter to send
  • The AI streams responses in real-time
  • Click Stop to halt generation early