Inkwarden — AI writing companion
Co-founded Inkwarden — an AI writing companion with connected worlds, character sheets, timeline-aware suggestions, admin tooling, and a calm interface built for long-form fiction.
What Inkwarden is
Inkwarden is a product for writers who want structure without killing creativity: worlds, lore, and cast that stay coherent as the manuscript grows. I co-founded it and own the product and frontend — information hierarchy, editor UX, and the AI-assisted flows that sit on top without getting in the way of the writing.
The app combines a connected wiki, timeline, and character tooling — the kind of interconnected data model that punishes sloppy frontend architecture. What's shareable is the live product and how it behaves for real writing sessions.
Landing & first impression
The marketing site leads with the promise: worldbuilding and novel writing in one place. The hero shows the actual workspace — lore, characters, and timeline in a three-pane layout — so visitors see product, not pitch deck.
Workspace & AI companion
Inside a world, the workspace is organised around assets: encyclopedia entries, characters, places, and drafts. Search, sync status, and a formatting toolbar stay visible without crowding the prose.
The AI companion reads your world's context — not generic chatbot summaries. It can flag continuity issues, suggest lore expansions, and answer from what the project actually knows.
Worlds & character sheets
Each world scopes its own cast and locations. Character sheets hold voice notes, backstory, and draft copy in one place, with quick actions to save, open chat, or jump to the full editor.
Writer dashboard & profile
Signed-in writers land on a calm dashboard: worlds, works, and billing as clear entry points — no clutter between sessions.
Profile settings let writers personalise how Inkwarden addresses them — name, region, use case, and interface language — with avatar customisation alongside.
Admin — content & operations
On the admin side, I built tooling to run the product: blog and article publishing, user management, feature flags, and feedback review.
The blog CMS supports bulk scheduling, slug management, and a rich editor with preview — so SEO articles and product updates ship from the same system.
Individual posts open in a split editor: markdown-style body on the left, metadata — title, slug, excerpt, featured image, publish target — on the right.
User administration supports search and filters by tier, role, subscription state, and onboarding — the operational view for supporting a growing writer base.
The admin overview ties waitlist, feature flags, and early-access controls together — a single place to approve writers and iterate without destabilising the main app.
In-product feedback
Writers can send feedback from anywhere in the app. Submissions capture page context automatically so bug reports and feature requests arrive with reproduction detail.
What I'm building toward
- Companion workflows — AI that supports drafting and continuity without replacing author voice.
- A calm interface — surfaces that stay legible when projects get large and interconnected.
- Shipping discipline — the codebase stays private, but the product has to earn trust in public: performance, clarity, and respect for user data.
Note on the build
The repository is private. This case study is the product itself — screenshots with user data redacted, and the live experience at inkwarden.dev.