Tailspin Client

Tailspin: Craft Your Tale — Interactive AI Story Generator

Tailspin is an interactive web app that turns a click-assembled outline into a short story. Live at tailspin.fun.

Architecture

1. User selections — theme, characters, tone, ending, setting, and plot point come from curated pools in src/Genstar/data/.
2. On each “next suggestion” click the client POSTs the partial story plus a candidate pool to /api/v1/rank-suggestions. One Jev call scores candidates for coherence with the outline and the API samples top-k from that distribution (not just #1).
3. The user picks from those ranked suggestions.
4. POST /api/v1/create-story sends the full outline; the backend generates ~800 words under tone-matched style guidance.

If ranking is unavailable, the client keeps the legacy random path. The API signals that with degraded: true.

Data curation

Suggestion pools were editorially curated (Sept 2026) against literary-craft sources: Tobias’s 20 Master Plots (plot points mapped to all 20 shapes), Freytag’s pyramid, and five-elements storytelling. Names went from 1,411 → 397; modern/AI themes were added; settings taxonomy drift was fixed. TypeSafe Jev coherence checks: mean 2.19/3, zero clashing configs.

Features

• Click any element to reroll it (Jev-ranked when the API is up).
• AI-backed full-story generation from the outline.
• Tones and endings as first-class constraints, not decorations.

Getting Started

git clone https://github.com/ktleary/tailspin-client.git
cd tailspin-client
npm install
npm start

Runs on localhost:3000. Point the API at http://localhost:8080 (see src/Genstar/components/story.js).

npm run build

License

GPL-3.0-or-later.