How I started building TaleCheck

I have been writing my book, Codex Machina, for about ten years. At some point I got stuck: I couldn’t find a human editor — didn’t even know where to look — and I needed beta readers too.

A year ago I thought: if Claude Code can program, maybe it can handle a book. I’ll save it as a text file and ask it to find inconsistencies or track how a character changes — let it navigate the book the way it navigates code.

It worked, but awkwardly. One big file was hard to work with, and when I asked for a rewrite, it rewrote the chapter not the way I wanted. I needed control over every word.

So I moved to plain Claude on the web: I pasted chapters one by one and asked for the harshest possible review, bad-cop style. At first it praised me — “well done, you write well” — but I wanted a real verdict, not flattery. Once it got tough, useful advice started coming, and I worked like that for several months.

Then I hit the context limit. I jump between chapters — the tenth, then the fifth — and the model started mixing things up. ChatGPT didn’t fit either: fine with the book as a whole, off inside a single chapter.

That’s when the idea first came: a kind of linter. Run it, and for each chapter you see what is known at that point, while a programmatic check shows what changed and whether a character got lost. So it never happens that someone leaves to do something, I forget about them, and at the end of the book they pop up having done nothing.

In mid-July 2026 someone suggested I write a book about how I write a book with AI. I started, set up a private Telegram channel — and realised that text is hard to sell. But a program I can build. It’s useful to me and to many others: a cheap editor with an easy start — drop in a book and get advice almost immediately.

I built the prototype right in Claude on the web: it made me a page with scored tiles for each chapter. I liked that look so much that I kept it. Then the work got intense, and within a couple of weeks there was an alpha in a Telegram bot: upload a book, run the linter, get scores and advice.

After that I kept polishing it and meeting people. Today it’s a finished product where I’m smoothing out the details: TaleCheck.