Use when keeping AI-authored or procedurally-generated content coherent at scale — single voice across a corpus, a machine-readable lore bible with a "never violate" list, generate-then-rationalize causation, recurring thematic domains so generated figures cohere into arcs, the oatmeal/sameness problem, and the self-review pass that flags drift and duplication. The crux skill for headless / AI-authored games. Triggers on "AI-authored content", "keep it coherent", "single voice", "lore bible", "the LLM contradicts itself", "10,000 bowls of oatmeal", "generated content feels samey", "self-review pass", "narrative consistency at scale".
Use when keeping AI-authored or procedurally-generated content coherent at scale — single voice across a corpus, a machine-readable lore bible with a "never violate" list, generate-then-rationalize causation, recurring thematic domains so generated figures cohere into arcs, the oatmeal/sameness problem, and the self-review pass that flags drift and duplication. The crux skill for headless / AI-authored games. Triggers on "AI-authored content", "keep it coherent", "single voice", "lore bible", "the LLM contradicts itself", "10,000 bowls of oatmeal", "generated content feels samey", "self-review pass", "narrative consistency at scale".
AI-Authored Content Coherence
How to keep content an AI or procedural engine generates coherent at scale — one voice, no retcons, figures and events that cohere into arcs rather than dissolving into interchangeable mush. This is the crux discipline for a headless / AI-authored game, and it is the least solved — treat its rules as engineering hypotheses to de-risk early, not settled law.
When to use this
Designing the generation pipeline for lore, history, NPCs, items, quests
Writing the voice spec / style corpus and the machine-readable lore bible
Building the self-review / coherence pass over generated batches
Diagnosing generated content that feels samey, contradicts itself, or drifts in voice
Scope
This skill owns coherence of generated content (mostly non-visual). Adjacent siblings:
The generator itself + the sameness problem → procedural-generation
The review pass that gates a batch → procgen-review (this skill's self-review pass is that gate)
Visual coherence / house style (the visual analogue) → art-direction-and-readability
The lore the bible encodes → worldbuilding-and-lore
Quests generated over world state → narrative-and-quest-design
How the pieces fit
GUIDE.md — the why, with exemplars and citations. Heavily flagged: this topic's verification phase largely failed (session limit), so nearly all rules are sourced but unverified. The sources themselves are strong (Compton; Grinblat & Bucklew / Caves of Qud; LLM-consistency papers).
CHECKLIST.md — the what to do: Do/Don't plus "Test for" criteria for a generator, a corpus, and a self-review pass.
The one idea to anchor on
Mathematical uniqueness is not perceived variety. A generator can emit endless mathematically-distinct artifacts that players still read as one undifferentiated mass (the "10,000 bowls of oatmeal"). Coherence-at-scale is won by a shared voice + a never-violate fact bible + recurring thematic domains + an explicit self-review pass — and even then, coherence at full open-world scale is unsolved. De-risk with the oatmeal/fanfic tests from day one.
⚠️ Verification note: Built from a deep-research pass whose verification phase was cut short by a session limit; the synthesis step also partly failed. Almost every rule here is sourced but unverified — strong, well-cited defaults that should be re-verified, not treated as confirmed. See the banner in GUIDE.md.
