AI built this tool — it won't write your outline

How AI was used to build Plot Compass

Plot Compass was built by a writer, not a software engineer. AI coding tools were used extensively throughout development — writing code, debugging, building features, maintaining the site. Without them, this tool wouldn't exist.

Why AI isn't in the tool

Plot Compass is an outlining tool. Its job is to give you a structure, ask you good questions, and get out of the way. The outline is supposed to be yours — your ideas, your decisions about what the story is and where it goes.

Adding AI to that process would change what the tool is. If Plot Compass suggested plot points or filled in stages for you, it would stop being an outlining tool and start being a co-writer. That's a different product, and not the one I wanted to build.

This isn't a stance against AI in general, or a judgment on tools that use it differently. It's a design decision. The guiding questions in Plot Compass are meant to help you think, not to think for you. That only works if the answers are yours.

But I'd be lying if I said it was only a design decision.

Partly, this decision comes down to my own belief about what art and writing should be. They should be about self-expression, both in terms of the ideas that are conveyed and in terms of the language used to convey them. They should be imbued with something of yourself and the way you see the world, and not just in the large moments, but in the way a character wears their emotions, or the specific poetry you see in the way the falling leaves kiss the top of a lake at the beginning of fall.

Telling a chatbot to write a story for you and guiding the output to an eventual end "product" does not count. The self-expression is lost. The journey of finding the perfect words is lost.

You think differently when you write, and if you're not writing, you're not doing that specific kind of thinking.

That's why Plot Compass will ask you questions and never try to answer them for you.

What this means in practice

When you use Plot Compass, nothing you type is sent to an AI model. No suggestions, no autocomplete, no "AI-assisted" anything. Your outline goes into local storage or your cloud account, and that's it.

If this ever changes — and I don't expect it to — you'll be told clearly and given the choice to opt out.