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.

The four Prose Minion tools side by side: Assistant, Search, Metrics, and Dictionary

What's new in v2.0.3

GPT-5.6 base tiers — Luna, Terra, and Sol are now available in the curated model catalog, covering fast, balanced, and flagship 1M-context writing workflows.
New Grok and Aion choices — Grok 4.5 plus Aion 3.0 and Aion 3.0 Mini join the existing Grok and storytelling-model options.
Catalog reliability — removed the soon-to-expire openai/gpt-5.2-chat choice and added a guard that keeps Category Search settings synchronized with the curated list.

Full history → CHANGELOG.md

Get started in three steps

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

Three setup steps: open settings, paste your OpenRouter key, pick models from the live catalog

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

Tool	What it does	OpenRouter API key?
🤖 Assistant	Dialogue tags, action beats, and cliché/repetition/show-vs-tell passes on a selected excerpt or whole chapter, optionally grounded in a context brief pulled from your story bible	🔑 required
🔍 Search	Word Search (pattern matching + cluster detection) and Context Search (find words by meaning — `[anger]`, `[color red]`, `[movement verbs]`)	Word Search free · Context Search 🔑
📊 Metrics	Word count, pacing, dialogue %, lexical density, readability, hapax rate, publishing-standard comparisons by genre and trim size, per-chapter breakdowns	✅ free, offline
📖 Dictionary	Fiction-focused definitions — pronunciation, sense explorer, register, character-voice variants — for any selected word	🔑 required

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.

Left: an excerpt with a context brief and referenced story-bible files. Right: the resulting dialogue and microbeat analysis.

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

The Writing Tools picker: fourteen analysis passes across Primary, Dialogue, Craft & Voice, and Technical groups

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.

Prose Statistics, Style Flags, and Word Frequency reports side by side

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.

Dictionary lookup input with scene context next to the resulting writer-focused entry

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

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