What is Alcove?

Alcove is a narrative operating system for branching serialized fiction. You create or Remix a Cartridge (a reusable story world), open a Save File (your timeline), and write chapters in the AI assistant you already use.

Alcove is not where you write. Alcove is what remembers, checks, and decides.

The system proposes; the writer steers.

How you use it

Alcove runs as a remote MCP server. You connect it once to an MCP-capable assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor — and from then on that assistant can read your canon, submit a chapter for checking, and ask you before anything becomes permanent.

There is no Alcove app to learn. The tools appear inside the assistant you already write in.

See MCP & your AI to connect, or Your First Chapter for a walkthrough.

What it actually does

It remembers. Every locked chapter updates a typed record of your world — who is alive, what they know, which promises are still open, what the rules of your magic system are. Your assistant reads that record before it writes, so chapter 40 knows what happened in chapter 3.

It checks. Before anything is locked, a set of AI lenses read the chapter against your canon: contradictions, adherence to what you asked for, your world's own rules, and safety. You see what they found. The checks are the product — the writing is the commodity.

It decides nothing on its own. A chapter that has been checked is still just a proposal. Nothing enters your canon until you Canon Lock it.

Draft is not canon until you lock it.

Your canon is real git

The record Alcove keeps is not rows in a database you cannot reach. Every locked chapter is a commit in an ordinary git repository, and every fact about your world is a file in its tree:

state/character/kael/status

One value per file, which is what lets two branches of your story merge cleanly — disjoint edits to the same character do not collide.

This matters for one reason: you can leave. git clone --mirror gives you everything, in a format every tool on earth already reads. No export request, no proprietary bundle, nothing to reverse-engineer.

Under the hood that is a self-hosted Gitea — MIT licensed, run unmodified. We deliberately write zero lines of Go against it, because a forge we had to patch would be a forge we could not keep current, and your story would be the thing at risk.

What it is not

• Not a writing app. It has no editor. You write wherever you already write.
• Not a publishing platform. No feed, no followers, no comments. Export your work and publish anywhere.
• Not a black box. Every check tells you what it found and why; every state change is shown before it is applied.
• Not a lock-in. See above — it is git.

Where to go next

• Your First Chapter — connect and lock your first chapter
• MCP & your AI — the tools your assistant gets
• The core loop — the cycle you repeat
• Canon Lock — the moment a draft becomes true
• Glossary — Cartridge, Save File, Remix, and the rest