Reading the manuscript with AI
Sgeulai can read your manuscript and build the Story Bible from it. The important thing to understand is not how it works but what it is allowed to write down without asking.
Everything writes straight in
When Sgeulai reads your manuscript, everything it finds — facts, like a character existing or two people being related, and interpretive readings, like what someone is afraid of or what a scene is for — writes straight into the Story Bible. There is no review queue to work through first.
The safety net: every raw response is archived
Before anything is written, the model's raw response is saved to disk —
inside Sgeulai's own container, at ~/Library/Containers/com.BMI.ePub.Sgeulai/Data/Library/Application
Support/Story Hopper/AI Extractions/. If a run writes something wrong,
or a response fails to parse and the section is skipped, the text the model
actually returned is still there — and Replay Archived AI
Results… (below) reads it straight back into the Story Bible without
paying for the API call again.
Replay Archived AI Results…
Re-reads responses from an earlier run into the Story Bible. No API call is made and nothing is charged — the tokens were paid for the first time. Use it when a run's results were lost: cleared by a replacing run, dropped by a bug, or never written because the response failed to decode.
The picker groups responses into runs by when they were saved, and preselects the most recent one, which is usually the one worth recovering. Only the passes that carry a Story Bible can be replayed — a cast index or a scene-split proposal is a different shape and is shown greyed out.
A full project backup is also saved automatically before a replacing run — see The Tools menu ▸ Show Automatic Backups.
AI Readings
Propose Scene Splits… (below) is the one AI command left that still queues its output here for review rather than writing it straight in — a proposed split changes the shape of the book, not just a field, so it waits for Accept. If you have older readings or new-record candidates already sitting in AI Readings from before this change, they're still there and still reviewable exactly as before; nothing already queued was removed.
Which engine reads it
With a Claude API key set, Anthropic's Claude does the reading — the richest extraction available. Without one, Sgeulai falls back to the on-device Apple Intelligence model, and nothing leaves your Mac. See The Claude API key for getting one, paying for it, and exactly which of the commands below need it.
The manuscript's menu shows which engine is active as a line at the bottom: Engine: ….
The three ways to run it
Analyze Manuscript with AI…
The first read. Builds the Story Bible from a manuscript that has not been read before — new Characters, Locations, Events, Organizations, Themes, and Objects, plus interpretive readings on them, all write straight in.
Re-analyze, Replacing Previous AI Results…
Clears what earlier AI runs of that manuscript wrote, then reads it again and writes the results straight in, the same as a first analysis. Records you typed or imported are kept. Use this when the manuscript has changed enough that the old reading is wrong rather than incomplete.
Re-analyze, Inserting New AI Results…
Two passes in one run. First, the same read as Analyze Manuscript with AI…, looking for Characters, Locations, Events, Organizations, and Objects the Story Bible doesn't have yet. Then it goes back over the records the manuscript already has and fills the fields that Compact and Necessities show, from what the prose says. Both passes write straight in. Nothing is deleted, but a field that already has a different answer is overwritten, not just filled in when blank.
Because it reads the whole manuscript for new records, this costs about what a first analysis or a replacing run does — no longer the lighter, blanks- only pass it once was.
Find Only What’s Missing…
The cheap re-read. It sends the manuscript along with a list of what your Story Bible already holds — every Character, Location, Event, Organization, Theme and Object by name — and asks the model to report only what is not on that list.
Two things follow from that. It costs less, because the reply carries only new records rather than the whole cast again; and it is much less likely to be cut off part-way, since the length limit is spent on what you don’t have instead of what you do. On a book you have already analysed once, this is the one to reach for when you have added chapters and want to know who is new.
The trade is that records you already have are not re-read. Nothing existing gets corrected, enriched, or filled in — for that, use Re-analyze, Inserting New AI Results…. Relationships and dates are still reported, including ones that connect a new record to an existing one, which is often the most useful thing a second pass finds.
One narrow exception: a chapter or scene with no in-story date — when it happens in the book’s own time, not when it was written — is asked for just that one field. It is the only existing-record field this run ever touches, kept this small on purpose so the command stays the cheap, narrow one; everything else about an existing chapter or scene still waits for Re-analyze, Inserting New AI Results….
New records write straight in, nothing is deleted, and the raw response is archived to disk first like every other run. If the model reports something you already have anyway, it is dropped on the way in rather than duplicated.
Propose Scene Splits…
A narrower, cheaper pass for one specific job: chapters that have never been split into scenes get a proposed set of scene breaks, each a verbatim span of the chapter's own text with a title suggested from its opening line. Nothing is created outright — proposals wait for review the same way AI Readings do, and accepting one is what actually turns the chapter's prose into real scene records.
What gets sent
Only the field-filling half of Re-analyze, Inserting New AI Results… leaves out chapters marked as front or back matter — a copyright page and an acknowledgements section have nothing to say about who is in the book, and filling their fields costs you money for no answer. Its discovery half reads the whole manuscript, front and back matter included, the same as the other three runs — the first analysis, replacing a previous run, and proposing scene splits.
The manuscript is uploaded once per run and the questions are asked against that single copy, rather than the book being re-sent for every question.
A note on trust
The analysis is a reader, not an authority. It is good at noticing that a character appeared in fourteen scenes and confident about things it has no way to know — and now that its output writes straight into your Story Bible with no review step, that confidence lands directly in your record. The archived raw response (above) is what lets you check its work after the fact, or recover from a run that got something wrong, rather than catching it before it's written.