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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2586 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 16, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I suppose I can always shill SillyTavern again, which despite a barely-responsive dev is still the most feature-complete LLM frontend I've tried; out of home for the week, I'm currently forced to use Agnaistic and I stumble over UI knobs and switches too often to be able to goon at all.

I don't have the Tavern UI before me but off the top of my head:

lets me write the overall style guide,

The prompts settings let you set the exact content and order of the entire wall of text you send to the LLM.

character / setting notes,

Main body of character notes goes into card definitions, setting can go into the additional info -> scenario field. It's sent as text anyway so this is more of a convenience thing.

"previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the last chapter" condensed history notes

goes into Author's Note, optionally buried on some # message depth in the chat history; I usually just put PAST EVENTS (separated with newlines etc.) after char defs.

and then the notes for the scene (and the beginning of the next scene to help flow). The scene notes would be a combination of "A does X, B mentions Y" and occasional inserted sentences like "The silence was interrupted by a doorbell ring" (that are more ideas for the LLM and don't need to be preserved as-is).

If you don't want to actually self-insert chat, you can just put instructions in your "replies" as long as your prompt sequence/preset says that this can be a possibility. Usually LLMs are smart enough that I can just "say" something like [OOC: now draw describe her getting an education] and get the needed continuation.

It should let me generate multiple variations, manually edit the previous prompts and generated results for continuation and crucially never delete unused generations so I can later steal sentences and ideas from them (but I don't need explicit branching from every response).

All in by default, in fact I think "swipes" and generally complete control over chats is the comfiest feature of ST by far and I have no idea why this is not the default in corpo apps. I tried the Claude app for work after years of chatbotting and I frequently raged at the stupid frontend preventing me from editing old responses or forking chats for no reason far as I can see. Cursor feels much better in this regard.

Your call on how usable ST's UI is, it's fairly customizable and I've grown to like it against my will anyway.

I'll echo other posters and caveat that my own experience with genning OC things based on my own drafts has been mostly disappointing (too prone to getting stuck on character quirks and needing to show them off in some fashion in every fucking response), but I'm not the karma police here. Might be a prompt issue on my part.

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