CurioQuest — Wiki Index

Type: project Created: 2026-06-29 Last Updated: 2026-07-07 updated: 2026-07-07

🔴 CURRENT STATE (compiled truth — rewrite freely)

As of 2026-07-07: the automated book pipeline is DISCARDED, redesigned as an editor-in-chief craft studio — design + plan APPROVED, Phase 0 (Character Bible) DONE and LOCKED. The founder scored the 2nd fully-produced book (Water Cycle) -1/10; the whole automate-end-to-end approach was rejected and rebuilt from scratch via superpowers:brainstorming → writing-plans.

Approved redesign (docs/superpowers/specs/2026-07-07-curioquest-studio-design.md + docs/superpowers/plans/2026-07-07-curioquest-studio.md in the repo): - KDP Phase 1 = 7 excellent FIXED books = a bookmaking/craft problem, NOT the real-time per-child personalization pipeline (that's the later D2C product). - Founder is editor-in-chief: approves each artifact (story, character designs, storyboard, final art) before the next stage. Make real books BY HAND first → they define "done" → automate only after a baseline exists. - Writing: founder gives premise + setting (or "Generate premise" button) → ONE coherent manuscript → founder edits hard (3-5 rounds expected). Teaching model C: guide teaches warmly + kids do + small aha (reverses old D17). - Art: storyboard-first — lock cast-sheets → storyboard all 12 spreads → approve → final art. - Layout: HTML/CSS + headless Chrome (Google Chrome.app present), NOT pdf-lib. - Model routing: Fable 5 = story writer ONLY; Sonnet = code subagents; Opus = orchestration/editorial judgment.

Phase 0 DONE — Character Bible LOCKED (commit 81799a7): Ronav (hero, based on founder's real son — full messy hair, gap-tooth smile, ROAR T-Rex tee, always carries a toy T-Rex), Zara (puff buns/teal glasses/notebook), Sam (fair/freckled, deliberately differentiated from Ronav after founder caught a "same face different clothes" miss), Professor T-Rex (white coat, pocket-watch, glasses). Gouache art style, classic-storybook layout style — both founder-picked from side-by-side samples. Cast refs: docs/specs/character-refs/*.png.

Fix-and-learn from this round: two Ronav correction cycles happened because prompts were regenerated from a compressed text label instead of re-deriving from the actual reference photo. Prevention: always re-ground image prompts in the source reference on every regen, never in an earlier description of it.

Root-cause lesson (the big one): never build a content factory before producing ONE genuinely excellent artifact by hand; you cannot automate a quality bar you have never established. Founder's law: "nobody pays for engineering rigor, they pay for the book."

Next: Phase 1 — the manuscript. Fable 5 writes the Water Cycle story from the founder's hilltop premise; founder edits hard until genuinely good. This is the real test.

What still stands (reusable): Gemini image generation + vision (GEMINI_API_KEY; OpenAI fully removed 2026-07-06), the character-conditioning mechanism (proven), the pedagogy in docs/Project-Objective.md (source of truth). Live locally: operator console /operator + KDP landing /. Code on branch feat/quality-loop-winner-prompts (private GH arijitchowdhury80/curioquest).

Resume: repo ./SESSION.md → finish brainstorm (stopped mid-Q4: art approach + style) → design doc → writing-plans.

Below the divider = append-only history / file map. The compiled truth is ABOVE.

Files (2026-06-29 snapshot — predates the pivot, treat as history)

Decision Records

Sources

Recent Activity

Related

• dev-log
• 2026-06-29-claude-code-oauth-text-generation

Folder catalog (auto-added 2026-07-07 clean-brain — every note must be reachable from its index)

• AGENTS
• open questions
• overview
• requirements
• CurioQuest operations log