Guide
Turn your book into a Lokee vault with an AI coding agent
Finished a novel? A coding agent such as Claude Code or Codex can read it chapter by chapter and write a complete Lokee vault — characters, places, relationships, quotes and an event plan — that you open in the free desktop app. You pay only for your own agent subscription.
At a glance
- Cost
- Your own agent subscription; no Lokee credits
- Time
- An afternoon of agent work for a typical novel, plus your review
- You need
- The Lokee desktop app, a coding agent and your manuscript
- Result
- A vault folder you open in Lokee, with everything marked unverified until you check it
Step by step
1. Install Lokee and decide where the vault will live
The free desktop app for Windows and macOS opens vaults that are ordinary folders on your computer. You don't need an account, nothing is uploaded, and a local vault has no limit on the number of entities — the right home for a whole book.
- Desktop: the agent writes the vault into a new, empty folder, which you then open in Lokee. Pick that folder now — for example next to your other vaults.
- Web: there is no folder to open, but a zip of the vault can become a new cloud vault. The free plan includes one cloud vault of up to 100 entities, which a whole novel usually outgrows.
2. Put the manuscript in a working folder
Copy your manuscript into a folder of its own. Markdown or plain text works best; the agent can also convert a Word document or an EPUB. The first prompt splits the book into one Markdown file per chapter, keeping the text word for word.
- Work on a copy, never on your only manuscript.
- If your chapters are already separate files, name them in reading order: 01-…, 02-… and so on.
- Keep the prologue, epilogue and glossary — they are often full of names.
3. Run the agent with the kit prompts, in order
Open Claude Code, Codex or another coding agent that can read and write files on your computer, in the working folder. Paste the prompts from the kit one after another, after replacing the placeholders in curly braces. Start a fresh session for each prompt — the agent works from the files, not from memory.
- Prepare the book — chapter files, chapter groups and an extraction spec for your book; you approve the entity types.
- Extract each chapter group — one agent per group, running in parallel.
- Merge — duplicates become one entity, and dossiers are prepared for the next step.
- Write descriptions — a wiki-style article for every entity (optional).
- Build the vault — the agent writes a small script that produces the vault folder and a zip.
- Check the vault — a script verifies ids, links and citations before you open it.
4. Check the result
Read the agent's summaries: how many entities of each type, how many quotes it could not find in the text, how many relationships pointed at unknown names. Then open a few entities you know well and compare them with the book. If something is off, fix the extraction or the build script and run the build again — because the ids are derived from names, the vault comes out the same, only corrected.
5. Open the vault in Lokee
In the desktop app, on the start screen:
- Open vault → choose the vault folder the agent wrote. It opens in place: nothing is copied or uploaded, and there is no size limit.
- Or Import from zip → choose the zip and a folder to put the vault in. Lokee copies it into a new local vault with fresh ids. Zips of up to 8 MB.
- On the web, Start from a downloaded demo in your vault list accepts any vault zip of up to 8 MB and creates a new cloud vault from it. The free plan includes one cloud vault, so this works while you have none yet.
6. Review what the AI extracted
Everything the agent wrote is marked as AI-extracted and unverified, so you can always see what you have not checked yet.
- Start with the main characters: read the description, check the quotes and relationships, then mark the entity as verified.
- Citations lead back to the passage in the book, so checking a doubtful fact takes seconds.
- Merge duplicates the agent missed, and delete entities you don't need.
- The event plan lists every chapter with its plot beats — a quick way to spot what the agent misread.
What it costs
Nothing in Lokee: the desktop app and local vaults are free, and no Lokee credits are used. The reading is done by your agent, on your own subscription or API account. A whole novel is a lot of reading — every chapter is read at least once, main characters more than once — so on a plan with usage limits you may need to spread the work over a few sessions.
How long it takes
Preparing the book takes a few minutes of your time. Extraction depends on the length and on how many groups run at once: a typical novel of 80,000–120,000 words in five or six parallel groups is an afternoon of agent time, and merging and descriptions take another hour or two. Reviewing is up to you — start with the main cast and do the rest as you go.
Tips from a real run
- Split the book into chapter groups of about 15,000–25,000 words and run one agent per group at the same time. Smaller groups mean more careful reading.
- Insist on exact quotes. Citations are found by searching the book for the quote, so a paraphrase is simply dropped.
- Fix the keys for the main cast before extraction starts, and keep a merge list for the variants that still slip through. Consistent keys are what join many chapter groups into one vault.
- Try the whole chain on two or three chapters first. Fixing the spec is cheap before forty chapters have been extracted with it.
- Keep the working folder. When you fix something, change the inputs and run the build again rather than editing the vault files by hand.
Limitations
- Agents make mistakes: a minor character merged with another, a relationship read the wrong way round, a fact taken from a dream sequence. That is why everything arrives unverified.
- Your book is sent to the agent's provider, such as Anthropic or OpenAI, under their terms and your account settings. Lokee does not receive it: with a local vault, nothing leaves your computer for Lokee at all.
- The agent writes Lokee's vault files directly, without the checks Lokee's own import makes. Run the check prompt; if the vault still won't open, ask the agent to compare its files with the format described in the build prompt.
- The result is a snapshot of the finished book. Chapters you write later are easier to add in Lokee itself.
Prefer to do it inside Lokee?
On the Sync and Pro plans, Lokee's AI credits extract characters, places, relationships and events from a manuscript inside the app, with a review screen before anything is added. In a local vault in the desktop app you can also run that extraction with your own Anthropic or OpenAI key, or with a local model.
See plans and AI credits →FAQ
Is this really free?
Lokee's part is: the desktop app and local vaults are free, and no Lokee credits are used. You pay your agent provider for the agent's work, through the subscription or API account you already have.
Which agents work?
Any coding agent that can read and write files on your computer and run a small script: Claude Code, Codex and similar tools. The prompts don't depend on a particular one.
Does it work for books that aren't in English?
Yes. The prompts tell the agent to write everything in the book's language, with names exactly as in the book. Only the file and field names inside the vault stay in English, because Lokee reads them.
Can I run it again after revising the book?
Yes. The build derives ids from names, so running it again on revised inputs gives the same ids to the same entities. Open the new folder as a separate vault and compare: a rebuild does not merge into a vault you have already edited in Lokee.