My AI writing setup's first rule is: don't write

I'm drafting a very old sci-fi novel of mine with Claude Code. Four scenes in. More excited about a creative project than I've been in years — and the reason isn't the speed.

It's that the workspace is built to refuse.

Setup: a folder called `writing-room`. Eight stages, from premise to compilation, each one a markdown directory the AI loads only when it's relevant. Compass, world, characters, structure, voice, writing, revision, compilation.

The first rule, hardcoded in `CLAUDE.md`:

> Before generating prose, always load `voz.md` and `padroes-prosa.md`. Without these two, refuse the writing task and ask the author to do Stage 05 first.

Translation: the AI cannot draft a scene until I've locked in the voice. And `voz.md` was reverse-engineered from scenes I wrote by hand. The voice is mine. The AI only gets to extend it.

There's also a file called `padroes-prosa.md` — 9 anti-AI-slope techniques. Verbalized sampling. Fragmentation. Character voice. Rare vocabulary. Every generated scene must apply at least 3, and the reviser uses the same file as a checklist.

What this changes in practice:

- I don't fight AI prose. I gate it.

- Each stage loads minimum context. The AI doesn't drown in 200k tokens of worldbuilding to draft one scene.

- After every scene, a `cronista` skill updates a canon file. Continuity stays cheap.

- I'm the bottleneck on voice. I'm fine with that.

The transferable bit, if you build with AI:

The most useful thing your workflow can do is sometimes say no. Refusing to act without the right inputs forces you to produce those inputs — and that's where your taste enters the system. Without that gate, the AI averages you out. Toward the median sentence. The median plot beat. The median version of you. A friend of mine said that "in order to have a second brain, you need to have a primary working brain". I laughed: true enough.

I wanted to build the gate first. Then let it write. And I'm loving it.

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