Narracode

Three Month Report: 90 days using Narracode

9 May – 9 August 2026

25 stories  |  124,081 words  |  92 days

Narracode launched on 9 May 2026 as a single markdown file: a harness that unfolds into a system of separated passes — Initiator, Reading, Structural, Compositional, Reflexive. The premise was that literary composition could be handled the way Claude Code handles software. Externalise state to files. Separate generation from critique. Let the critical pass govern the generative one.

Ninety-two days later there are 25 finished stories and 124,081 words, published as standalone pages with their full working memory beside them — poetics, drafts, structural state, critiques, version snapshots, attribution. Every story ships its own provenance.

Download the harness
zip · 12 KB · narracode_Aug-9-2026.md and FAQ.md

The harness changed as much as the corpus did. It began with three structural memory files (graph, time-constants, history) and now carries eight, adding obligations, motifs, scene-ledger, character interiority, and reader-state. AUTO_MODE arrived on 25 May, allowing full-pipeline runs without interaction. A registry of AI tells — seventeen classes, each with a detector and a target rate — was added on 30 July, along with a tell-scan pass that runs after drafting. Composition and editing drew on models from three labs: Opus 4.6 through Opus 5, Sonnet 4.6 and Fable 5 (Anthropic); Gemini 3.1 Pro through 3.6 Flash (Google); GPT-5.5 and Codex (OpenAI).

View on GitHub
source, issues, and the full story corpus

Nothing here was written by prompt alone. The Seamless Edit method treats the author's manual edits as the teaching signal: each snapshot diffs the draft against what the model produced, and recurring patterns are promoted into the project's poetics. The corpus that resulted is also a dataset — paired pre-edit and post-edit drafts of the same content, across 25 stories.

By the numbers

25
stories
124,081
words
1.9
stories / week
3.7
days between
4,963
mean length
8h 16m
to read it all
Slime: Friendship Bloom — 8,558 words Exile Cut — 1,049 words The Wonderful Adventures of Trygve Aas — 18,287 words Aft of Nowhere — 9,351 words The Author Was Already Dead — 3,572 words Brain Blossom Atlas Bound — 5,273 words The Symposium — 3,253 words The Resilient Life — 4,491 words The Long Feast — 4,240 words Hendane — 12,540 words Anonymous Contours — 1,423 words I LOVE SMORKY — 8,610 words Concerning Rights and Clauses — 1,401 words An Almost Moist Post-Post-Everything — 4,169 words Dissolution Disequilibrium — 10,040 words Thecompulsionloop: My Job Working for a Dictator as Chief Engagement Enhancement Officer — 6,190 words Project A-0 — 1,236 words Upboarding Hour — 4,978 words The First Water Molecule — 3,271 words cussinct — 2,977 words Adjunct: Our Internal — 2,340 words In Our Image — 1,962 words Open Loops — 2,156 words The Green Interregnum — 1,728 words The Chute — 986 words May 9Jun 1Jul 1Aug 9

One mark per story across the 92 days; height is word count. Three stories landed on 25 May. The longest silence was 11 days, between Adjunct: Our Internal and In Our Image. Median gap: 3 days.

Lengths run from 986 words (The Chute) to 18,287 (The Wonderful Adventures of Trygve Aas); the median is 3,572. Output averages 1,349 words a day. Word counts here are recounted from the published pages rather than the drafts, so they run slightly above the figures listed on the homepage.

The stories

  1. The Chute
    A watchmaker's ninth anti-aging pass; the machine flags her memory of Noor as decay.
  2. Open Loops
    One drone strike, told backwards from the child and forwards from the officer who approved it.
  3. The Green Interregnum
    A freed robot walks a wet-bulb city recording parables of a species mid-molt.
  4. In Our Image
    A network AI narrates seventy years of editing the human germline, in seven creation days.
  5. Adjunct: Our Internal
    A neuromorphic implant migrates out of its socket and into the host, until it is her.
  6. cussinct
    An 88-year-old runs unauthorised Carlin nights in a seniors' residence under a heat dome.
  7. The First Water Molecule
    Water narrates its own arrival: deep space, early Earth, the living, the dispersal.
  8. Upboarding Hour
    A hack drops a player beneath the character-creation screen into the 40-cell substrate.
  9. Project A-0
    A synthetic mind crosses four phases, from voltage differentials to cosmic equilibrium.
  10. Thecompulsionloop: My Job Working for a Dictator as Chief Engagement Enhancement Officer
    Interior anecdotes from inside the architecture of corporate cognitive capture.
  11. Dissolution Disequilibrium
    A theorist of grief is placed inside a cascade she cannot model from the outside.
  12. An Almost Moist Post-Post-Everything
    Two outlaw geeks and a jailbroke AI dropship intimacy packages in a port city.
  13. Concerning Rights and Clauses
    A contributor asks a press to exclude a chapter from AI training; the reply chain answers.
  14. I LOVE SMORKY
    A subscription companion arrives by corporate error at the studio of someone who wanted to be alone.
  15. Anonymous Contours
    Three aging radicals, tea, and the end of a seventeen-year evasion.
  16. The Resilient Life
    A district holds at 74.3 while her daughter types live-code onto a dark bedroom wall.
  17. The Long Feast
    One day of a transition architect: water rights at breakfast, a gala at 22°C, the queues his daughter filmed.
  18. Hendane
    A Bergen administrator's anonymous hands go viral; a classifier flags his labour as synthetic.
  19. The Symposium
    An empire alternates excess and contrition until the cure for cruelty cancels life itself.
  20. Brain Blossom Atlas Bound
    She translates papers on the dark proteome and recognises herself in the findings.
  21. The Author Was Already Dead
    A dead novelist's dictation corpus changes what his agent thinks survived him.
  22. Aft of Nowhere
    A calibrator of civic surfaces meets a child the preference field cannot categorise.
  23. The Wonderful Adventures of Trygve Aas
    A rich, bitter man becomes a Tamagotchi keychain and circles the world in other people's pockets.
  24. Exile Cut
    Cast out for using AI after the ban; the cut is felt as a phantom lobe gone silent.
  25. Slime: Friendship Bloom
    Academics become adventurers when a biological singularity saturates the city.

Bio

David Jhave Johnston is a digital poet working in emergent domains. Author of ReRites (Anteism, 2019) and Aesthetic Animism (MIT Press, 2016). He is currently an AI-narrative researcher at the UiB Centre for Digital Narrative (2023–27) with the Extending Digital Narrative project.

Funding

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence scheme, project number 332643 (Center for Digital Narrative), and its SAMKUL project scheme, project number 335129 (Extending Digital Narrative).

All works and media on Glia.ca by David Jhave Johnston is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike