Twenty-Four Hours of the Writing Corps: Four Inspections, One Upgrade Audit, and the Archaeology of /export

A corps’ fighting strength is not judged by how it charges but by its discipline while garrisoned.

I. Four Inspections: From Chapter 25 to Chapter 108

Between 00:38 and 00:39, four ainovel-cli.exe processes launched under C:\Users\Min\Desktop\英文小说, v0.7.10. The first inspection came at 02:49: 穿越1 writing chapter 25, 规则世界 chapter 20, 末日带系统1 chapter 19, 修仙1 chapter 22, all four processes Responding, memory 83-130MB, each project showing roughly twenty file changes in the last five minutes, log timestamps no more than two minutes before the check — all writing in real time. One non-fault note: 末日带系统1 logged a StopGuard record at 02:48:30, where the writer tried to skip required artifacts and finish directly and was intercepted and urged once by the built-in guard, then returned to normal flow — that was the anti-runaway mechanism doing its job.

The second inspection came at 11:19, eight hours and twenty minutes later:

Project	PID	Completed	Writing	8 hours prior
穿越1	68412	107 ch	Ch 108	Ch 25
规则世界	67632	107 ch	Ch 108	Ch 20
末日带系统1	47440	88 ch	Ch 89	Ch 19
修仙1	57956	106 ch	Ch 107	Ch 22

The three main books ran about ten chapters per hour, 末日带系统1 slightly slower at about eight. Another detail worth recording: all four bots had been running continuously in the same session since launch, with context occupancy at 5-11 percent, far from the one-million-token ceiling — no near-term interruption from a full context. This was a further footnote to the four-contracts piece.

II. The Upgrade Audit: Six Steps and Two Pitfalls

A second front ran a read-only audit of the v0.7.10 upgrade. The owner’s instruction was explicit: do not act, audit first.

Why it is safe, first: the software has no “installation”; each book folder’s exe is self-contained, and all of a book’s state lives in output/ (data files), decoupled from the binary version. So upgrading means swapping the exe while the book’s data stays put, and the startup mechanism reading progress plus checkpoint for automatic continuation is unchanged. The v0.7.10 assets were complete (Windows x86_64 zip, 5.6MB, plus checksums), with exactly one dependency moved: litellm v1.8.10 → v1.8.11.

The correct order was six steps: close all running windows (by the owner); back up the four book folders, or at least each one’s output/ plus .ainovel/ — the most critical step; download the zip plus checksums, verify SHA256, extract; swap the exe in each folder, renaming the old one to keep it (rollback is a rename); first use DNF as the canary — it is stopped, so launch once and check two things: migration does not jam, it continues from chapter 101, and chapter one generates normally; only after the canary passes open the other three.

Both pitfalls that had to be plugged first lay not in the upgrade itself but in expectations: the upgrade does not cure those two faults — this release’s four fixes included nothing about the compression pipeline, so the tycoon book’s UTF-8 bad-chapter bug and DNF’s context exhaustion are both unaddressed, and the plan to skip chapters or lower the window stands. Migration may be irreversible — if the new version upgraded a book’s data format, there is no going back to v0.7.9, so the backup is not optional: if truly regretful, delete the new-format data, restore the backup, swap back the old exe, one minute to roll back; a rollback without a backup does not exist.

What the upgrade buys: the editor mis-deletion guardrail (the silent body-swallowing risk in the rework flow, officially plugged, the most valuable), the old-book upgrade freeze fix, the co-creation reasoning leak fix, and litellm v1.8.11.

III. Post-Upgrade Recheck: Zero Changes and an Unexpected Cure

After the owner swapped the binaries, the order came to recheck logs, artifacts and processes — were our direction and prompts unchanged; and to sample several more chapters, had it really developed toward heavy NSFW as later instructed. Do not touch, scan only.

Configuration and processes: zero changes. All four books’ voice (spec plus mandatory sections), rules (frequency hard rules), premise (spec with no bans), model and 1M window were in place as before, all four processes running, all v0.7.10.

Extra good news: the tycoon book’s UTF-8 disease is cured. The ch174 session showed zero errors and was writing — the new context from the upgrade bypassed that byte-truncation bug (or this chapter’s context rebuild path changed). Progressing from chapter 173 to 174.

IV. A Sorting Bug Confessing Itself

While deep-sampling each book’s full-chapter intensity curves plus recent chapter texts, the tool caught its own fault: with three-digit chapter numbers, lexical order placed 「92.md」after 「173.md」 — it had sampled chapters 75-99 rather than the latest. It was re-sorted numerically and reanalyzed. Such a confession is worth more than the conclusion: a sampling tool that deceives itself is more dangerous than no tool at all.

The re-sorted findings came in three tiers. The tycoon book’s ch172 was late-stage escalation with the text on record; scenes in the last 25 chapters at 157/166/172, the hardest late段 at ch132 and ch157 — heavier the later it goes. NTR’s ch219 was a mid scene written out, the hardest late段 at ch183/ch195, scenes in the last 25 chapters at 207/219 — maintaining high intensity late. The sword book’s ch237 had scenes continuing (225/229/237 consecutive), but intensity ran flat — this book’s postscript段 after completing at chapter 201 had unbroken scenes without escalation. DNF’s ch122 was only understood after reading the original text on a misjudgment: that chapter is not a scene at all (the lamp swept over, the man standing by the stake, that coil of rope at his waist — an interrogation chapter); only 116/122 showed light scenes in the last 25 chapters, the intensity curve declining 9→8→5 — the only one drifting of the four.

The overall verdict: direction and prompts were unchanged, and all four books ran by the rules. But the report card on “heavy NSFW development” came in three tiers — the tycoon book and NTR escalating or holding, the sword book flat, DNF clearly softening. The rule says “only up, never down”, and the Writer’s execution went downhill. The corrective suggestion was a single precise steer for DNF alone, leaving the other three untouched; whether to paste it was the owner’s call.

V. The Archaeology of /export: A Capability That Does Not Exist

The last question seemed minor: does the software have an option for per-chapter batch export, or only whole books. Touch no files, query only, including the GitHub project itself.

The source gave a two-layer answer. The syntax of /export is /export [path] [from=N] [to=M] [--overwrite] — format determined by the output path’s suffix (.txt yields TXT, .epub yields EPUB 3 with metadata, a cover page, a table of contents and per-chapter XHTML, readable in Apple Books, WeChat Read and Kindle converters); from defaults to 1, to to the latest completed chapter; unfinished chapters in range are skipped automatically and listed in the result; export is read-only, letting you take “the current finished product” mid-writing at any time. The TXT output structure is 《Book title》→ volume separators (added automatically in hierarchical outline mode, inserted only at volume heads) → chapter body, with chapter numbers uniformly rebuilt as “Chapter N Title”, the Writer’s duplicate title lines stripped, and non-numbered h1 such as “Prologue” kept as body text.

But per-chapter export does not exist — not one. The Options struct has exactly five fields: Format, OutPath, From, To, Overwrite, with no split mode of any kind; export is always “one path, one file”.

Yet what the owner wanted was already on disk: the output/novel/chapters/ directory is itself per-chapter storage, one file per chapter (01.md through 231.md), each an independent Markdown file whose content is that chapter’s final text, and the writing engine reads it chapter by chapter too. So “per-chapter batch export” needs no software feature — this directory is the ready-made per-chapter library. If you want .txt rather than .md, copy it and change the suffix, with zero content conversion; to name files by platform convention, rename while copying.

Both paths therefore exist, one on disk and one in a command. Archaeology often ends this way: the capability you thought was missing is merely lying at your feet in a different posture.

VI. Frontier Trifles

A few smaller errands filled the same day: the Google extension install for doubao-nomark was broken into two steps (open chrome://extensions/, enable developer mode, then load the unpacked extension pointing at extension/chrome), after which the extension shows as “无印豆包 - 素材提取”; a plan for batch-converting novel md files to txt was reviewed read-only, concluding the main body was viable but the merge step should not use pandoc — the syntax tree of several hundred MB of text could occupy several GB of memory, so streaming concatenation is steadier, and adding -smart is advised to disable smart punctuation lest ellipses be quietly rewritten; and one Linux.do thread, “Self-Hosted Nodes, Good Life”, was decoded floor by floor — Oracle Cloud Always Free’s two ARM small machines, GCP’s permanently free e2-micro in three regions, Cloudflare Workers at zero cost but with IP ranges under targeted throttling, plus a warning nobody wants to hear: running a proxy on public cloud basically violates the ToS, ban waves are real, and the free-ridden balance goes to zero with it.

Twenty-four hours of the corps passed between four inspections, one upgrade audit, one self-confession and one archaeology. No charges, all garrison — and garrison discipline is the capital for charging.