[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationsh...
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Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationships using
Mermaidjs
Author : herol3oy
Score : 96 points
Date : 2025-04-09 15:34 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ozim wrote:
| I was thinking JIRA stories, well corporate dev dirty mind.
| error2go wrote:
| Was thinking the same. Could be a very useful tool to discover
| non obvious relationships between items in a large backlog
| infogulch wrote:
| You know Alice who wants to delete her account, and Bob who
| wants to change his password? Maybe the reason why they want to
| take account actions all of a sudden is because they're in the
| middle of a breakup and they're having trouble deciding how to
| divide their assets.
|
| We always take entities in our "user stories" as faceless
| actors with only enough depth to motivate basic actions in our
| app. What if we've been missing the real story all along, all
| these users are characters living out a grand Shakespearean
| drama, and we've been too blind to see it?
|
| ... Wow this is great, I can really appreciate the rich dynamic
| between Alice and Bob and Eve with this detailed backstory that
| links their lives. But it is getting to be a bit much to
| understand all the relationships now; it would be really
| helpful to have some way to track and visualize the
| relationships between all of these users / characters, what do
| I do?
| knowitnone wrote:
| This is handy. When I read, sometimes I have to go back and
| figure out who a character is so this is definitely right up my
| alley.
| herol3oy wrote:
| That was exactly what I struggled with--and still do!
| WillAdams wrote:
| How do typos get fixed?
|
| The entry for _The Book of Jhereg_ has "Morio" which is not found
| in the text (conflation of Morollan and Mario?)
| eterps wrote:
| The system prompt can be found here:
|
| https://github.com/herol3oy/austen/blob/main/src/server/rout...
|
| It would be more interesting if the graph could be generated by
| sourcing an arbitrary epub file into a RAG and have it figure out
| character relations without reading the whole book.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if it all could be done with a script
| using aichat[1] and rendering the diagram using graphviz.
|
| [1] https://github.com/sigoden/aichat
| herol3oy wrote:
| Oh, this is a great idea. I'd love to try it and maybe I could
| add this feature to the current one! Thank you.
| skeptrune wrote:
| I tried "The Wise Man's Fear" and the results were not so
| great[1]. It got a good number of the characters, but only showed
| them being related to Kvothe. Harry potter worked better'ish, but
| still not great[2].
|
| My primary interest would be using these relational graphs to
| generate better structured summaries of stories in a structured
| JSON object for improved search/recommendations.
|
| - [1]https://austen.pages.dev/ecbc2d49-c10d-4e49-ac68-0d37a819b52
| ...
|
| - [2]https://austen.pages.dev/ace16c1d-c74e-4737-a98d-5401047a1cd
| ...
| tshaddox wrote:
| The thought of The Kingkiller Chronicle hasn't crossed my mind
| in many years, and now I have renewed sadness that the story
| will never be finished. :'(
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Pat Rothfuss is still working on it, last I heard.
| napoleongl wrote:
| Wild that I was daydreaming earlier today about generating some
| diagrams with mermaid to show the plot and characters over the
| lifetime of a tv series!
| herol3oy wrote:
| This is a neat idea! My first try will be "The Sopranos".
| kacesensitive wrote:
| I did Dungeon Crawler Carl - hilariously wrong
|
| graph TD A[Carl] -->|Pet| B[Princess Donut] A -->|Enemy|
| C[Mordecai] A -->|Allies| D[Ellie] A -->|Allies| E[Katia] A
| -->|Enemy| F[The System] B -->|Rival| G[Bea] D -->|Friend| E E
| -->|Friend| A
| arkensaw wrote:
| i'm suffering some frequency illusion right now because I only
| heard about Dungeon Crawler Carl for the first time, literally
| yesterday and today here it is in a comment
| kacesensitive wrote:
| It's by far my favorite series. Def pick it up if you have
| time!
| kinow wrote:
| Mine too. I was disappointed I was going to be left with
| nothing exciting to read after The Wandering Inn, but this
| series is amazing. +1 on the suggestion!
| kinow wrote:
| I am reading it right now and thought what would be the outcome
| of doing the same!
|
| Bea being Donut's rival... sounds interesting. Depending how
| you interpret it, it's not entirely wrong?
|
| Carl being enemy of Mordecai looks really wrong though.
|
| As for Carl being an enemy of the System (I assume the AI),
| that's also debatable.
|
| And if the friend of a friend rule applied here, I think Carl
| would be a friend of Ellie too, since Carl is a friend of
| Katia, and Ellie is a friend of Katia too. And they are all
| allies. Weird.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| https://gitdiagram.com/ does something similar.
| wduquette wrote:
| Are story relationship diagrams of this kind a common thing that
| the OP's tool produces automatically, or did he devise both the
| tool and the diagram?
| memhole wrote:
| For anyone vibe checking the results:
|
| https://novelchallenge.github.io/
|
| At best you're looking at 60% or so accuracy
| skeptrune wrote:
| Actually incredibly good benchmark site, thanks for sharing!
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Tried Book of the New Sun. Apparently Terminus Est (a sword) is
| Severian's companion, and it completely fails to mention Dorcas.
|
| Oh well.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Then tried Little, Big by John Crowley and the relationships
| were probably wrong. I mean, Sylvia might be related to George
| Mouse, but probably should not have a family connection to
| Daily Alice.
| herol3oy wrote:
| Hi, I created the app. I appreciate all of your comments. I know
| some may find the result of a book not concise or accurate. One
| issue was that I couldn't afford the price of a better LM
| service. At first, I tried a free tier of Gemini, but its results
| were disappointing. Later, I switched to DeepSeek and got better
| results.
| blancotech wrote:
| Nice idea but the results weren't comprehensive for the book I
| tested. I find that chatgpt with web search enabled does a better
| job with the simple prompt "Create a relationship diagram for the
| characters in <BOOK TITLE> using mermaidjs. Include the
| relationships between people."
| hofo wrote:
| Dorothy is the "enemy" of the Wizard?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| It would be neat if this could handle spoilers. Imagine a friend
| becomes an enemy 75% of the way through the book. Would there be
| some way to say "What are the character relationships - I'm on
| chapter 7 right now"?
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