A product preview

What if a novel had a git log?

Spine turns a manuscript into a navigable graph. Scenes are commits. Plotlines are branches. Characters are contributors with line-level blame. The structure becomes visible — for editors who need to point at it, authors who need to revise it, and AI agents that can finally reason over a whole book at once.

Free demo: 1 editorial brief + 3 questions + 5 character chats per session, no account needed. Powered by Opus 4.7.

The metaphor

Both fiction and code are causal sequences of decisions made by agents. The primitives map cleanly. A literary critic's mental model and a senior engineer's mental model are the same shape.

git
spine
what it gets you
commit
scene
The atomic unit of narrative action.
branch
plotline
A divergent thread from the main arc.
author / blame
character involvement
Who drove what happened.
merge commit
plot convergence
Two threads returning to the same moment.
abandoned branch
dropped subplot
The threads that never resolve.
HEAD / main
dominant arc
Usually the protagonist's thread.
diff
scene-to-scene change
What shifted in the narrative state.

Try it on a classic

Two manuscripts ship pre-ingested. The editor brief is pre-generated and replays the live agent stream — same UX, zero cost. Click through to the workspace IDE: tension ribbon, prose canvas, plot graph, AskDock at the bottom.

Roadmap

What's shipped, what's next, what's beyond. We don't bill for what we haven't shipped. Roadmap items in the pricing page are clearly marked.

Now
  • Pre-loaded demo briefs
  • Editor brief on Opus 4.7
  • Plot graph + tension ribbon
  • Ask + chat with characters
  • EPUB / FDX / Scrivener / DOCX import
Next
  • ·BYOK on Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini
  • ·Teams + shared projects + roles
  • ·Annotation collaboration
  • ·Editorial scoring benchmark
  • ·Stripe billing + invoices
Later
  • ·Self-hosted deploy
  • ·SSO (Google Workspace)
  • ·Webhook integrations
  • ·Public reading-room shares
  • ·Manuscript versioning + diff insights at scale

Built for the manuscripts that matter

Your manuscript is not training data. We use providers; we don't train models. BYOK keeps the prose on your own provider bill. Encryption at rest for every secret.

Privacy

Manuscripts are private by default. We never train on your text. Read the practices.

Security

AES-256-GCM at rest for all secrets. Cookie-bound sessions. Layered abuse defense. SECURITY.md.

Open

MIT-licensed core. Self-host if you want. Read the code.

Built for the first reader who picks it up

Spine has just shipped. There are no testimonials here yet because we'd rather leave the cards empty than fill them with quotes we made up. If Spine helps you, your name and your sentence belong here. Write to support@rodyr.com.

Designed for
The developmental editor

Running brief on the first 30k of an unwieldy thriller, before sending notes to the author. The editor brief surfaces the structural seams in fifteen seconds.

Designed for
The MFA student in revision

Tracing five plotlines through a thesis novel. The plot graph shows which threads converge and which trail off into abandoned subplots.

Designed for
The literary scholar

Mapping causal structure across a 1500-scene 19th-century novel. Character blame and merge commits make centuries-old prose newly legible.

These are the workflows we built for, not customer testimonials. As real testimonials come in, they'll replace these.

Join the waitlist

We email you when a roadmap item lands. No spam, no marketing list. Unsubscribe in one click; we honor it.

Spine — git blame, but for fiction