Why FicMachine?

I started with AIDungeon, years ago. The pitch is very enticing: you play a character, and the AI plays the world. It describes what happens, it reacts to your choices, and your story happens in real time. A dungeon master that never gets tired, never cancels on game night, and improvises anything on the spot.

I played for hours and hours. And at first it was genuinely exciting, but then, after some time, you start noticing some cracks.

The AI didn't really introduce interesting things on its own, and it started repeating itself. Scenes stretched on and on without any sense of momentum. I'd walk into a tavern, talk to the bartender, and ten turns later, I was still in the tavern, having the same conversation in slightly different words. Or I would be walking through a forest, fight a monster, and repeat the same fight with a different monster a bit later. It quickly became apparent that the AI wasn’t building toward anything.

I kept playing along and waiting for the story to get interesting. And I realised that was the problem: I was waiting.

So I did what, I later found out, many experienced AI roleplayers do: I stopped waiting and started steering. I'd push the story towards drama. I would set up complicated situations, I would describe the villain, and introduce internal conflict. I was editing the AI responses and describing the world in my inputs, not just "I open the door" but whole paragraphs describing what was happening on the scene. I was doing half the writing myself, and the AI was doing the other half. And suddenly, the AI was having real moments of brilliance.

By the end, I wasn't really roleplaying anymore. I was co-writing fiction with the AI. And I was having more fun than I'd ever had before.

The only problem was the interface. The interface was fighting me every step of the way.

I didn't want a chatbox. I didn't want "Say this" and "Do that" buttons. I didn't want my story chopped up into messages. I didn’t want to click several times to edit the text in a separate screen.

What I wanted was simple: text on the page. A continuous story that I could read and edit freely, like a document. The AI writes, I edit, I press a button, the AI writes again. No chat format. No bubbles. Just a story that grows.

After the new year, I sat down and built a Gradio app on Hugging Face. It took about a week to get a working prototype. Nothing fancy. It was just a text area, a Continue button, and a connection to a language model.

I never polished it. I never got around to it, because I couldn't put it down. I'd sit down to fix a bug, but end up writing for two hours instead. The prototype was rough and ugly, but it was exactly what I wanted.

That Gradio app is FicMachine today. It has a nicer UI, images, and a form to create and share scenarios. This is just the beginning. But it already has everything I needed — which is the only reason it exists at all.