a novel-writing studio for your own machine
Your novel never leaves your machine.
brasslamp designs, drafts, and finishes books with you — on your own computer, with an AI model you provide. No cloud, no subscription, no account. When it edits, it writes a new version and shows you the diff; nothing you wrote is ever overwritten.
free · self-hosted · requires Docker and an AI model you provide — a local server such as koboldcpp or LM Studio, or your own API key
Yours, entirely.
brasslamp is 100% offline and self-hosted. Your manuscript, your ideas, and every draft stay on your machine — no cloud, no account, no telemetry of your work, and no training on it, because it never leaves the building. It works with whatever model you choose: a local server you run yourself, or a cloud API key if you decide the trade is worth it. That decision is yours, made once, in the open.
A whole studio, not a text box.
Most AI writing tools are a chat window with memory tricks. brasslamp is a pipeline: a guided story design that refuses vague answers, scene-by-scene drafting with a living memory of the whole book, a finishing suite — continuity, story audit, copy-edit, smoothing, proof — and export to EPUB, PDF, and DOCX. Each stage feeds the next. And if you already have a manuscript, it can start from that instead.
Honest automation.
brasslamp automates aggressively — up to a full unattended finishing run — but never
silently. Every pass writes a new version; nothing is overwritten, and everything is
revertible. Proposed rewrites arrive as word-level red/green
diffs. Copy-edits are deterministically verified against the original, so the worst
case is no change. Judgment calls aren't decided for you; they're left as flags, and
you walk them one at a time.
The pipeline, briefly
An interviewing architect builds the story bible, chapter map, and writing guide with you, and won't accept thin answers.
The engine writes scene by scene, carrying a living memory of characters, facts, and voice across the whole book.
Continuity checks, a developmental audit against your bible, verified copy-edits, polish — or one autopilot run that does the recommended chain unattended and reports back.
EPUB built in; PDF and DOCX one click away; an audiobook-ready export for TTS pipelines; cover-art prompts to take to any image tool.
Already have a draft?
Paste the manuscript in your drawer. brasslamp recognizes real-world chapter headings and scene breaks, confirms the structure with you, then derives the bible, the outline, and a writing guide with the voice sample quoted from your own prose — and the entire studio, autopilot included, works on a book it never wrote. Your original stays untouched.
Prose that doesn't read like a robot wrote it
You know the tells — the air that smells of ozone, the breath someone didn't know they were holding, the tension that was palpable. brasslamp bans them. A deterministic detector catches the clichés that make AI prose smell like AI prose, and a quality gate retries weak scenes with targeted feedback. This is enforced at write time, not suggested afterward. Your book's voice is locked from your own spec — or quoted directly from your own prose, if you imported a draft — and the engine is held to it.
Two honest limits, stated up front: the prose can only be as strong as the model you bring, and the final judgment on every page is yours. brasslamp's job is to enforce, verify, and show its work — not to replace your taste.
How it compares
| Cloud AI writing subscriptions | brasslamp |
|---|---|
| Monthly fee, per-word credits | Own it; your only cost is your own hardware and electricity — or your own API key |
| Your manuscript on their servers | Never leaves your machine |
| A chat box + memory tricks | Design → draft → finish → export pipeline |
| “Trust the output” | Verified passes, measured diffs, flags, reports, full version history |
| Generic AI voice | Voice locked from your spec — or quoted from your prose on import — plus an enforced ban on AI-tell clichés |
| Chat with a character card | Live-chat with your cast — solo interviews or a full group scene — grounded in the scenes they actually lived, guarding the secrets the story gave them |
| Starts from a blank page only | Also imports finished drafts and builds the studio around them |
What brasslamp won't promise
It won't write a publishable novel at the push of a button — no software will, and the ones that say so are selling something else. Output quality depends on the model you bring and the curation you do; the product's own philosophy is diagnose, fix, verify, with you as the editor. It needs an AI model you provide, and it's a single-author tool that runs on one machine. Its audit scores and confidence numbers are directional signals, not verdicts. What it promises instead: a real pipeline, your data staying yours, and an honest account of everything it did.
For the technical
An entire AI writing studio in the Python standard library — no framework, no vector
database, no numpy, nothing to pip install. One Docker command to start; a web
UI on localhost; any OpenAI-compatible endpoint as the model. The 800-plus-check test suite
runs fully offline. If that paragraph made you happy, the FAQ goes as deep as you want to.
Sit down at the desk.
One command, and the studio is running on your machine. Bring a model, bring an idea — or bring the manuscript that's been waiting in the drawer.