skald

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.

Named for the Old Norse poets who composed and memorized kings' sagas across generations.

Status: v0.1 — scaffold

What's wired:

• 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

Wired (this commit):

• clawdforge Rust SDK vendored at vendor/clawdforge/ (upstream: Sulkta-Coop/clawdforge clients/rust/)
• skald-core::forge — three-pass orchestration shell (gen / cleanup / audit). Prompts are TODO stubs; pipeline plumbing is in place.

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

docker compose -p skald up -d
docker exec skald skald import-markdown \
    --path /seed/coast-down.md \
    --title "The Coast-Down"

curl http://lucy:7780/health
# → { ok: true, db_ok: true, story_count: 1, ... }

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.