Ai authored content coherence

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.

Start with GUIDE.md, then apply CHECKLIST.md.