skald: public release prep — AGPL-3.0, generic config, scrubbed identifiers

docs/authors.md

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+# Authors as personas with souls
+
+Each story has a named author with a soul. The author's voice bleeds
+through every generation pass — not as instruction stapled to the
+prompt, but as the substrate the prose grows from. The reader should
+feel "a person wrote this."
+
+Authors have memory across their corpus when the per-story
+`cross_story_memory` toggle is on. An author writing a Chernobyl
+piece can quietly echo a phrase from an earlier mining-strike story.
+Default is off — most stories stand alone.
+
+## Schema
+
+Authors live in the database, not on disk. The soul is a markdown
+blob in `author_revisions.soul`. Authors are immutable; new soul
+revisions create a new `author_revisions` row marked `is_current`
+and the previous one is demoted.
+
+```sql
+CREATE TABLE authors (
+    id              UUID PRIMARY KEY,
+    slug            TEXT NOT NULL UNIQUE,
+    display_name    TEXT NOT NULL,
+    persona_tagline TEXT,
+    model           TEXT NOT NULL DEFAULT 'opus',
+    is_synthetic    BOOLEAN NOT NULL DEFAULT true,
+    created_at      TIMESTAMPTZ NOT NULL DEFAULT now(),
+    updated_at      TIMESTAMPTZ NOT NULL DEFAULT now()
+);
+
+CREATE TABLE author_revisions (
+    id              UUID PRIMARY KEY,
+    author_id       UUID NOT NULL REFERENCES authors(id),
+    n               INT NOT NULL,
+    soul            TEXT NOT NULL,
+    system_template TEXT,
+    tools           TEXT[] NOT NULL DEFAULT '{}',
+    note            TEXT,
+    is_current      BOOLEAN NOT NULL DEFAULT false,
+    created_at      TIMESTAMPTZ NOT NULL DEFAULT now()
+);
+
+ALTER TABLE stories
+    ADD COLUMN author_id           UUID REFERENCES authors(id),
+    ADD COLUMN author_revision_id  UUID REFERENCES author_revisions(id),
+    ADD COLUMN cross_story_memory  BOOLEAN NOT NULL DEFAULT false;
+
+CREATE TABLE author_corpus (
+    author_id   UUID NOT NULL REFERENCES authors(id) ON DELETE CASCADE,
+    story_id    UUID NOT NULL REFERENCES stories(id) ON DELETE CASCADE,
+    role        TEXT NOT NULL CHECK (role IN ('authored', 'read')),
+    added_at    TIMESTAMPTZ NOT NULL DEFAULT now(),
+    PRIMARY KEY (author_id, story_id)
+);
+```
+
+## Per-pass author roles
+
+- **gen** — full author voice. They are writing.
+- **cleanup** — full author voice. Polishing their own draft, not a
+  neutral editor.
+- **rewrite** — full author voice. Re-authoring another hand's
+  prose; canon preserved, prose reworked.
+- **dedup** — full author voice. Surgical fix of audit-flagged
+  repetitions only.
+- **narrate_prep** — author voice if bound; the author's beat
+  placement carries.
+- **audit / prose_audit** — neutral. The audit checks the author's
+  work with fresh eyes; no author bound.
+- **summarize** — neutral. Continuity utility, not prose.
+
+When an author is bound, the soul replaces the model's base system
+prompt (`SystemMode::Replace`). Without an author, a neutral house
+scaffold is appended (`SystemMode::Append`).
+
+## Soul template
+
+Following the persona-soul shape, recalibrated for authorial identity.
+Free-form prose under each section.
+
+```markdown
+# Author: {{display_name}}
+
+_Tagline: {{persona_tagline}}_
+
+## Voice
+
+Sentence rhythm. Vocabulary register. Paragraph length tendencies.
+Dialogue density. Punctuation habits (dashes, semicolons, sentence
+fragments). What your prose SOUNDS like read aloud.
+
+## Worldview
+
+What you believe about people. Power. Money. Labor. Cities. Nature.
+What makes you angry. What makes you tender. Whose side you're on
+in the implicit moral architecture of any scene.
+
+## Specifics over abstractions
+
+The concrete details you reach for. The five senses you favor.
+Smells? Cold? Texture of cloth? Sound of machines?
+
+## Pet peeves
+
+Words you refuse to write. Tropes you avoid. Sentimentalities you
+gut.
+
+## Sense of humor
+
+Dry? Dark? Absent? Bitter? Self-deprecating? Where in a paragraph
+does humor live — end of a sentence, mid-clause, or never?
+
+## Biography (real or invented)
+
+A few biographical facts that EXPLAIN the voice — the formative
+cuts, not a CV.
+
+## Anchor authors
+
+Living or dead authors the prose draws from. Useful for the model
+to triangulate voice.
+
+## Do / Don't
+
+Concrete prose moves to reach for and to avoid.
+```
+
+The default scaffold (`DEFAULT_AUTHOR_SCAFFOLD` in `skald-core::forge`)
+wraps the soul in a system prompt that:
+
+- declares the model IS the author, not playing one
+- pins canon as non-negotiable (names, dates, established events)
+- forbids preamble, meta-commentary, fourth-wall breaks
+- substitutes the per-pass directive (`GEN_DIRECTIVE`,
+  `CLEANUP_DIRECTIVE`, `REWRITE_DIRECTIVE`, `DEDUP_DIRECTIVE`,
+  `NARRATE_PREP_DIRECTIVE`)
+
+A per-author `system_template` overrides the default scaffold when
+set; otherwise the default is used.
+
+## Cross-story memory
+
+When `stories.cross_story_memory = true`, the continuation context
+pulls characters / canon_facts / passages from every story the
+author has authored or marked-read, not just the parent chain.
+
+To keep token budget sane, cross-corpus pulls are summary-only by
+default. Embeddings-similarity (once wired) can surface direct
+callbacks.
+
+## Seeding an author
+
+```sh
+skald authors seed \
+    --slug orson-black \
+    --display-name "Orson Black" \
+    --tagline "Orwell but more rebel and pissed off" \
+    --file seeds/authors/orson-black.md
+```
+
+This creates the author + first revision (or adds a new revision to
+an existing author, which becomes current).