Everyone's using these AI writing tools to churn out blog posts or fix their emails. I figured I'd try to break one. Instead of asking Sudowrite for a story, I treated it like a character generation API for a world-building project. The premise was simple: feed it a one-line, overly-tropey character prompt and see if it could add dimensions, or just give me back a pile of clichés with better adjectives.
Here's the initial prompt I used, deliberately bad:
> "A grizzled veteran space marine with a secret heart of gold."
Sudowrite's "Brainstorm" feature gave me a list of expansions. Most were predictable, but a few had a glimmer of something usable. The key was to treat the output not as prose, but as raw material for a character sheet. I took the most interesting fragments and fed them back in using "Describe" on specific aspects.
For example, from a generated note about "a small, illegal hydroponic garden in his barracks," I prompted:
> Describe the single plant he's managed to keep alive. Focus on the contrast between the plant and his standardized military-issue quarters.
The output was actually decent. Not Pulitzer stuff, but it gave me a concrete, visual anchor for the character that the original one-liner never would have.
```yaml
# Character Fragment Generated from Sudowrite Output
character: Varko
role: Sergeant, 7th Orbital
core_trait: Ritualistic maintenance of a single, scarred Martian ironweed plant.
visual_anchor: The plant's rust-colored leaves are the only non-regulation color in his cube.
conflict_seed: Uses his combat knife to carefully trim dead leaves. The same knife is listed on his kit sheet as "for field operations only."
```
This is where it gets interesting for us. It's a lot like managing a complex config: you start with a base template (the trope), apply iterative refinements (targeted prompts), and parse the output for usable data structures. The tool fails spectacularly if you expect a finished product. It hallucinates details just like a misconfigured service mesh might route traffic to a phantom pod.
The real test was asking it to generate a background incident for this marine that *wasn't* about a heroic sacrifice or a dead comrade. I asked for "a tactical mistake he still believes was the correct logistical choice." The result was a passable, mildly conflicting memory about diverting a medevac shuttle for ammunition resupply. Not mind-blowing, but it added a bureaucratic shade to the "grizzled" archetype.
So, is it useful? As a brainstorming rubber duck, maybe. It's faster than staring at a blank page. But you have to approach it with an engineer's mindset: garbage in, garbage out. And be ready to filter the hallucinations aggressively.