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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious: what was the novel about?

It's a comedic adventure novel set in the Minecraft universe.

Actually I forgot there's a second one he read all the way through, for which he defined the initial concept and early plot, but then the rest of the plot and the writing were all done by GPT-4.5.

The code is kind of basic, and each chapter is written without the full text of prior chapters, but the output isn't bad.

https://gist.github.com/rahimnathwani/41e5bc475163cd5ea43822...

Very fascinating, I tried doing the same years ago with a simple Markov chain model. The biggest problem back then was inconsistency. I'd love to read a chapter of the Minecraft or hard magic / sci-fi books to check out the writing.

Email in profile.

Not having access to earlier chapters is a terrible thing, but maybe possible if you aren’t too bothered by inconsistency (or your chapter summaries are explicit enough about what is supposed to happen I suppose).

I find the quality rapidly degrades as soon as I run out of context to fit the whole text of the novel. Even summarizing the chapters doesn’t work well.

Yeah this is true. I could have sent the entire book up until that point as context. But doing that 100 times (once per chapter) would have meant sending roughly 50x the length of the book as input tokens (going from 0% to 100% as the book progressed).

This would be fine for a cheap model, but GPT 4.5 was not cheap!

I would have liked to have fewer, longer chapters, but my (few) experiments at getting it to output more tokens didn't have much impact.

Yeah, that’s what I eventually ended up doing. Quality and cost both went through the roof. To be fair, Claude is good about caching, and with a bunch of smart breakpoints, you pay only 10% for most generations.

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