skald (engine/tortoise): public release prep — AGPL-3.0, generic config, engine-variant README

README.md

@@ -1,95 +1,43 @@
-# skald
+# skald — `engine/tortoise` variant
 
-Long-form story-writer with canon-keeping, sequel continuity, and
-(future) self-hosted audiobook narration. Database is the source of
-truth — the writer is the tooling.
+This branch is the **Tortoise-TTS backend** variant of
+[skald](https://git.sulkta.com/Sulkta-OSS/skald). It carries
+engine-specific tuning for Tortoise that doesn't generalise to the
+other backends; everything else tracks `main`.
 
-Named for the Old Norse poets who composed and memorized kings'
-sagas across generations.
+For the full project — the story-writer, the schema, the narration
+pipeline — see `main` and the root `README.md`.
 
-## Status: v0.1 — scaffold
+## What's different here
 
-What's wired:
+Tortoise-TTS is the highest-quality narrator of the three backends,
+at the cost of speed: it is far slower than real-time and is meant
+for batched, overnight renders rather than interactive use. The
+tuning in `engines/tortoise/server.py` covers:
 
-- Rust workspace (`skald-core` + `skald`)
-- Postgres schema for stories, characters, canon facts, chapters,
-  passages, generation runs, audit findings, tags
-- pgvector extension installed for future similarity search
-- `skald import-markdown` ingests a story file (chapters + bible)
-  into the schema
-- `skald serve` exposes `/health` and runs migrations on boot
-- Single-container deploy: postgres + skald in one image
+- **Sentence chunking** — long passages are split so each chunk
+  conditions cleanly.
+- **Device selection** — explicit GPU/CPU placement.
+- **Pitch / rate modulation** — post-processing for single-voice
+  multi-character rendering.
 
-Wired (this commit):
+Tortoise has ~25 named built-in voices, so no voice cloning is
+required. On an 8GB GPU it wants the card largely to itself — stop
+the other engines for the duration of a Tortoise run, or give it a
+dedicated GPU.
 
-- clawdforge Rust SDK vendored at `vendor/clawdforge/` (upstream:
-  `Sulkta-OSS/clawdforge` `clients/rust/`)
-- `skald-core::forge` — three-pass orchestration shell (gen / cleanup /
-  audit). Prompts are TODO stubs; pipeline plumbing is in place.
+## Usage
 
-Not yet wired:
-
-- Web UI (the inbox + browse + queue surface)
-- Prompt templates for the three passes (heavy prompt-engineering
-  work — own session)
-- `skald-core::context` — assemble the LLM context blob from DB rows
-  (bible + characters + parent prose summaries + similarity-matched
-  passages)
-- Embeddings backfill + ivfflat index
-- TTS sidecar container + post-render audit chain (see
-  `docs/tts-pipeline.md`)
-
-## v0.1 smoke
+The Tortoise sidecar speaks the same `POST /synthesize` + `GET
+/healthz` contract as the other engines (see `engines/README.md`).
+Point skald's `TORTOISE_URL` at it and route `tortoise_*` voices to
+it.
 
 ```bash
-docker compose -p skald up -d
-docker exec skald skald import-markdown \
-    --path /seed/coast-down.md \
-    --title "The Coast-Down"
-
-curl http://localhost:7780/health
-# → { ok: true, db_ok: true, story_count: 1, ... }
+docker compose up -d            # skald + postgres
+# bring up the Tortoise sidecar from engines/tortoise/
 ```
 
-## Schema (cheat sheet)
-
-```
-stories         → meta + status + parent/root for series
-characters      → real or fictional, story-scoped
-canon_facts     → setting, mystery, theme, rule, historical_anchor, hook
-chapters        → full prose body
-chapter_summaries → short summaries for cheap context loading
-passages        → paragraph-level + embedding vector(1536)
-generation_runs → every LLM call logged
-audit_findings  → canon audit output (severity + area)
-tags            → arbitrary labels
-```
-
-## Architecture (v0.1 + the plan)
-
-```
-┌─────────────────────────────────┐
-│  skald container                │
-│  ┌───────────┐  ┌────────────┐  │
-│  │ postgres  │  │ skald-rust │  │
-│  │ pgvector  │←─│ axum + cli │  │
-│  │ localhost │  │ :7780      │  │
-│  └───────────┘  └─────┬──────┘  │
-└─────────────────────────┼────────┘
-                          │ HTTP (future)
-                          ↓
-                    ┌──────────┐
-                    │clawdforge│
-                    └─────┬────┘
-                          ↓
-                     opus calls
-```
-
-v1.0+: extract postgres to its own container on db-net. skald
-becomes pure stateless rust, connects via `DATABASE_URL`. Migration
-is a connection-string change + a network move; the binary doesn't
-care where the DB lives.
-
 ## License
 
-MIT.
+AGPL-3.0-or-later — see `LICENSE`.