Storyboard

Ask for eight panels of your story and you get eight different worlds. The model remembers nothing between calls, so your hero is a stranger by panel three.

Write the story once as JSON. Get a finished board back.

OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-... pnpm tsx recipes/storyboard/run.ts

Two models, one program

An image model draws. A language model directs it and judges the result. Both are ordinary services, so the whole board is one Effect:

const board: Stream<BoardEvent, BoardError, ImageGenerator | LanguageModel>

• generate draws your cast on plain backgrounds, once.
• edit draws every panel, conditioned on the sheets it needs, so no panel is a copy of a copy.
• streamTurn with a StructuredFormat gets the director’s plan back as typed data, not text to parse.

board is a Stream, so sheets, panels and rejected takes land on disk as they happen instead of after the last call. The pipeline names only the generic ImageGenerator and LanguageModel tags, so swapping provider is a Layer change with no edit to the recipe.

cast     draw the sheets                  concurrent
direct   an LLM plans scenes and shots    one call
stage    draw each scene, empty           concurrent
             ↓  then panel by panel, in order:
         render → critique → redo

Why this shape

• Chaining alone drifts. Panel N from panel N-1 is a copy of a copy: AnchorEdit finds “minor artifacts or identity deviations can be recursively amplified”, and FreqEdit measures the noise stacking per turn.
• The fix is not to drop the chain, but to never drop the anchor. AnchorEdit keeps the first frame “as a persistent anchor that is never evicted”: 33.5% → 52.9% over ten-plus turns. VINCIE sees no artifacts at all with the full context attached. Hence sheets and the previous panel.
• Fixed stages, model decisions inside them, the shape published comic pipelines converge on (COMIC, CineAGI, TheaterGen). None hands a model a tool belt. That is why the plan lands in shots.json: a bad panel is a prompt you can edit, not a choice that happened once.
• A sheet is drawn for the job. A wide establishing shot has your character twelve pixels tall, with no face to anchor to.

Your story file

stories/kite.json is everything you edit.

{
  "style": "Style: full colour cyberpunk manga panel art … No text, no lettering.",
  "sheets": [{ "id": "nix", "description": "Character sheet. Nix, a scrawny teenage …" }],
  "beats": [{ "page": 1, "shot": "Wide establishing. Dusk on the roof …" }]
}

• style — the medium: ink, shading, palette. Never a place.
• sheets — one per thing that recurs, props included. Name what a reader can spot, and say how big it is in words.
• beats — what happens, one per panel. Camera and action only; appearance belongs to the sheets.

Point --story at your own file. Nothing else changes.

Each run writes its own output/storyboard/<timestamp>/: the board, the sheets/ behind it, and the takes the critic rejected/.

Flag
--story	Your story JSON
--model / --llm-model	provider:model for the artist and director
--resolution	1K, 2K, 4K. Start at 1K
--rounds	Retries when a panel drifts
--panels	Cut it short. --panels 1 is a smoke test
--base-url / --llm-base-url	A gateway the registry has no name for

Swap either model without touching the code. --model google:gemini-3.1-flash-image draws on Gemini instead of OpenAI; --llm-model anthropic:claude-sonnet-5 hands directing to Claude. Drop the prefix and you get OpenAI. openrouter: and requesty: route through a gateway on one key.

Budget a minute per panel at 1K. 2K costs about four times as much.