Prose Minion: Writing Toolkit

Workshop your prose where you already write it.

Select an excerpt, attach a context brief built from your own story bible, and run focused craft passes — dialogue, gesture, cliché, continuity, metrics — without leaving VS Code. Bring your own OpenRouter key; Metrics and Word Search need no key at all.

What's new in v2.3.0 — Workshop sessions that follow your work

• Saved sessions lead after Git sync — Workshop loads the named session and preserves meaningful unsaved differences in a separate recovery session when needed.
• Opening a session leaves its saved file alone — automatic context rereads stay in memory until you work or explicitly save/refresh. Resume notices begin with your first interaction.
• Clearer loading and recovery — loading stays visible after dismissing the welcome notice, old status messages clear when you switch sessions, and cache-copy failures are reported separately from successful named saves.
• Refresh your references — reread changed context files from the project, with clearer excerpt and context cards. File-backed attachments are read-only; text briefs remain editable.
• More room for your writing preferences — writer-profile biographies now support 20,000 characters.
• GPT-6 Astra joins the model pickers — available in shared selectors and Category Search, with existing defaults unchanged.

For Git-synced projects: a named session reverted through Git also replaces its clean local cache, including autosaved turns. Older caches may produce one conservative recovery when you first load them after upgrading.

Also in v2.2.4 — Muse Spark 1.3

• Muse Spark 1.3 joins every shared picker — Meta's latest 1M-context multimodal Muse model is now available for Assistant, Dictionary, Context, Workshop, Conversation Widgets, and Category Search. Muse 1.1 and 1.2 remain available, and no defaults change.

Also in v2.2.3 — Safer Workshop sessions + Gemini 3.8 Flash

The conflict-selection behavior described below is superseded by v2.3.0: named sessions now take precedence automatically.

• No silent cross-machine overwrite — when a portable named Workshop session disagrees with the machine-local recovery copy, Prose Minion preserves both instead of guessing from timestamps and overwriting one.
• You choose the room that wins — open the named session explicitly from the Workshop session browser to promote it after a sync conflict.
• Normal autosave stays seamless — matching current and named checkpoints remain associated and continue through the existing ordered save path.
• Gemini 3.8 Flash joins every shared picker — Google's new 1M-context Flash model is available for Assistant, Dictionary, Context, Workshop, Conversation Widgets, and Category Search without changing any defaults.

Also in v2.2.2 — Portable excerpts and faster models

• Projects can move without losing their excerpts — Workshop can securely reconnect a persisted file-backed passage after the project moves to another computer or filesystem location, without weakening workspace, traversal, or symbolic-link protections.
• Mercury 2.5 Preview is ready for the quick work — the exceptionally fast, inexpensive diffusion model is now selectable for Dictionary, Assistant, Context, Workshop, and Category Search.
• Claude Fable 5.1 joins the room — Anthropic's stronger, more concise Fable generation is available alongside Fable 5, so you can choose the editorial voice that fits the work.
• The shelves stay tidy — one unavailable model and three retired dedicated Opus Fast IDs have been removed; existing defaults and saved selections are unchanged.

Also in v2.2.1 — Fresh model catalog

• GLM 5.3 Flash is here — a fast, multimodal 1.31M-context option for responsive critique, large-context analysis, and utility rewrites.
• More strong value choices — GLM 5.3, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731, and Qwen3.8 Flash join the curated model browser; the three Flash models are also selectable for Category Search.
• Less catalog drift — retired OpenRouter IDs have been removed, so newly saved selections point to models the provider still serves.
• Your choices stay yours — existing saved model selections and the Category Search default are unchanged.

Also in v2.2.0 — Conversation Widgets

• Play before you commit — Workshop ships Gesture Playground, Lexical Gravity, and Creative Variations as interactive surfaces with explicit writer-owned commit points.
• Return to the work — committed widgets leave re-openable transcript chips; one-shot explorations clone into new turns, while standing Lexical Gravity directives remain editable between runs.
• Safer sessions — released pre-widget Workshop files migrate automatically to the new session schema, feature-owned recovery preserves supported older widget drafts, and stricter integrity checks reject malformed state before it can replace a healthy room.
• A sturdier Workshop — room orchestration, persistence, presentation workflows, and widget families have named ownership boundaries backed by architecture tests.

Full history → CHANGELOG.md

Get started in three steps

1. Install from this Marketplace page, then open the Prose Minion panel from the activity bar.
2. Try Metrics or Word Search right away — both run entirely offline, no API key needed.
3. Add an OpenRouter key to unlock the Assistant, Context Search, and Dictionary.

Want a guided, no-code walkthrough — project folders, glob patterns, every setting explained? → Read the Setup Guide

Four tools, one sidebar

Curious what real output looks like on an actual manuscript? → Browse the Examples gallery

The Assistant

Pin an excerpt, attach a context brief built from your own characters and canon, and run a pass. The analysis respects what you've marked as intentional — and pushes on everything else.

Fourteen focused passes, from Dialogue & Beats to Continuity — each one a single, opinionated read of your excerpt:

Search: by pattern, or by meaning

Word Search finds every occurrence and flags clusters — free and offline. Context Search finds words by meaning: ask for "emotion verbs" and get flinched, froze, hated back with counts.

Metrics: know your manuscript

All offline, no key, no cost — from a single chapter to the whole draft, with publishing-standard comparisons by genre and trim size.

A dictionary that writes fiction

Not a definition lookup — a craft reference: connotation, register, sense explorer, soundplay, and character-voice variations for any word or phrase in your draft.

Project structure & context

The Assistant's context features shine with a lightly organized project: one chapter per file, plus folders for characters, locations, and story-bible material that Prose Minion turns into clickable resource pills during analysis. The Setup Guide walks through the whole layout — including glob patterns, demystified — in about five minutes, no coding required.

Privacy

• API key stored in your OS keychain via VS Code SecretStorage — never written to settings files.
• Metrics and Word Search run entirely offline; nothing leaves your machine.
• Only Assistant, Context Search, Context, and Dictionary call OpenRouter, and only with the text you send them.
• There's no Prose Minion server — your writing has nowhere else to go.

Requirements

• VS Code 1.75.0 or higher
• An OpenRouter account for AI-powered tools (pay-as-you-go; Metrics and Search need nothing)

License

AGPL-3.0 with Commons Clause — source-available, no resale, no closed-source derivatives. Free for personal and open-source use; see LICENSE for full terms. Commercial licensing: open an issue.

A note from the author

I built Prose Minion for my own novel-writing workflow, pairing it with Cline as a copy-paste-friendly analytical companion: metrics and word searches from Prose Minion, revision discussion in Cline's chat. I kept going because it turned out other writers wanted the same setup — so here it is, publicly available. Happy writing.

Acknowledgments

Built with OpenRouter, the VS Code Extension API, and React. Development assisted by Cline, Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex.

Support development

If Prose Minion earns a place in your workflow, consider buying me a coffee — it funds the OpenRouter catalog audits and keeps this maintained.

Website • Setup Guide • Examples • Changelog • Report an Issue