AI Assistant

Throughline is not an “AI writes your story” tool. If you choose to turn AI on in the settings, the assistant does chores: it rephrases passages, reads what you already wrote and fills in the beat summary, proposes emotional charges in Arcs, and other helpful tasks.

Off until you say otherwise

The AI Assistant is off by default. You turn it on under Settings → AI Assistant. Nothing is sent anywhere until you’ve enabled it and invoked an action yourself, and when you do, only the text that action works on is sent.

Bring your own provider

There’s no Throughline AI service and no bundled model. You point the app at a provider you control.

• Ollama, running on your own computer: private and free. Your writing never leaves the machine. Throughline detects a local Ollama install and lists the models you’ve downloaded.
• Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint: OpenRouter, for example, or anything else that speaks the same API, with your own API key. The key is stored only in your local Throughline settings file. You can use ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral (this one works very well!) or any custom endpoint that’s compatible.

Use the Test connection button to check if it’s set up correctly.

The AI writes in your project’s screenplay language, English or German, set in Project Details. If you’re writing in a different language, it will also try its best!

In the Write Workspace

Draft at the cursor. Describe what should happen next, or how the selected passage should change, and Throughline drafts it in place, streaming as it writes. If the new pages give dialogue to Characters who weren’t in the scene, they’re cast into it automatically.

Draft scene from summary. Turns a Beat’s summary into a first pass at the scene, so you have something to argue with instead of a blank page.

In the Draft Workspace card editors

Derive summary from script and Derive title from script, in the Beat editor, read what you actually wrote and write the card back’s summary or the Beat’s title from it. Useful when the scene drifted from the plan and the card no longer matches it.

Derive character from story, in the Character editor, fills in a Character’s details from how they behave across the story.

Derive description from scenes, in the Setting editor, writes a Setting’s description from the scenes that happen there.

Derive logline from story, in Project Details, does the same job for the project as a whole.

In the Shape Workspace

Infer relationships from beat, in the Constellation, proposes how your Characters feel about each other in a given Beat.

Infer arc from beats reads each Beat in an Arc and proposes emotional charges for the whole plotline. If some Beats have no summary to read, it writes those first.