Chronicle

This is a day by day account of the ten days David MacIver spent building “How to Save the World” with Claude Code, from first setting the premise on 24 August 2026 to finishing the draft on 2 September. It is reconstructed from git history and from the session transcripts published elsewhere on this site, so it only knows what committed files and recorded conversations show. Where the record is thin, the entry is short rather than padded.

How to read this

Each day has its own page, headed by a one-line summary of what happened. Where a day’s work happened inside a single recorded session, the page links to that session’s transcript. Several days share a session, because David’s sessions often ran past midnight, and where that happens the same transcript link appears on more than one day’s page. A few days combine two or three shorter sessions.

Nothing here goes beyond what the published chapters and the book’s own blurb already say. Character names other than Edwin Moss and Peri Millbrook, later plot content, and anything past the published scenes are left out, matching what the transcripts on this site also redact.

The arc of it

David spent the first day and a half not writing fiction at all, but arguing with Claude Code about how the prose should sound. He had it read published web fiction for register, study a couple of well-regarded webfiction books for craft lessons, and build a list of “LLM tells”, the reflexive habits that mark prose as machine-written, things like certain adverbs, tidy three-part lists, decorative endings. Most of that list stuck for the rest of the project. Once a voice was settled, David put up canon files, a magic system, and a five-book series plan fast, and drafting began.

Then came the pattern that repeats through the whole project: draft, get flagged, throw away, redo. A batch of exemplar chapters were deleted early on as scaffolding, which turned out to break the voice, because later drafting sessions had nothing concrete to imitate and drifted back toward generic fantasy prose. They were restored. A citation-checking script found that background documents describing the world were fabricating quotations from the manuscript, over a hundred of them, quotations from scenes that had never been written. David had to track those down and fix them by hand. The worst of it came on 30 August: a full second act of some sixty-five scenes, already drafted and reviewed, was rejected outright for contamination. The new prose had leaned too hard on older discarded drafts, and David had to start again from a clean brief.

Underneath the drafting, David kept building small pieces of infrastructure as he needed them: a tool to check for repeated phrases across the manuscript, a local web app for leaving inline comments on chapters, a script to keep a personal e-reader in sync with the latest draft. Eventually there was a full Royal Road publishing pipeline too, built by driving the site’s own upload forms in a scripted browser.

By the last day covered here the full draft was finished, across three acts, and the opening chapters were already live on Royal Road on a daily release schedule. The first forty scenes, grouped into chapters, are what readers have so far. Getting there also produced several complete drafts nobody will ever read, and a set of house rules about prose habits that got argued over, tightened, and occasionally reversed as new problems turned up.