Fabble, or: writing stories with a serverless backend that won't bankrupt me
Preamble A couple of summers ago I had what felt like a small, contained idea: ask an LLM to write bedtime stories for kids, give it some structure, glue images and audio on top of the text, and call it a day. The plan, written down on a Sunday afternoon, fit in a paragraph. The system as it stands today does not. The original prototype was called Fable. It was a script with two HTTP calls in it and a folder full of .txt files. The current incarnation is Fabble (fabble.me), a tier-gated serverless application on AWS that generates and validates stories, makes illustrations and audio on demand, broadcasts a fresh story to subscribed users every week, deals with payments via BuyMeACoffee, and has just enough operational scaffolding to wake me up when the weekly cron decides to misbehave at 17:00 UTC on a Wednesday. It also has the property that, occasionally, it writes a story I’m proud to read aloud. ...