The last version production saw was 3.4.5, at the end of July. Since then we have shipped 27 releases and 113 changes, and you have seen none of them — they sat on the test branch waiting to come across together.
So this is going to be long. It is the only catch-up you get. If you read one section, read Before you update at the bottom; that is the part you will actually need.
First, why 4.0 rather than 3.9. What changed this round is not a feature list, it is the shape of the product: three studios became one, the file tree went from “text and pictures” to six kinds of file, the AI stopped only writing sentences and started editing structure, the interface went from five languages to six, and the mobile version was rebuilt rather than adjusted. That is a new skeleton, not a bigger pile.
1. Three studios became one
Studios
3.x: three rooms
Switching meant going back out to the home screen
Three studios, three separate file lists; the AI only ever saw one side.
4.0: one Writing Studio
A screenplay is a file type in the tree
The series bible, each episode and the map of the city, all read at once.
Writing, screenwriting and reader feedback used to live in separate rooms, and switching between them meant going back out to the home screen.
There is one studio now. A screenplay is a file type inside the Writing Studio — right-click in the file tree, “New Script”, one episode per file. That sounds like a technicality and it is actually the whole point: the series bible, each episode, and the map of the city it happens in are finally siblings in one tree, and the AI reads all of it at once.
Script Studio is winding down. Projects already in there stay open and stay writable; we are not going to leave anyone halfway through a season. What it no longer does is start new work. Each old project’s ⋯ menu has “Copy as a new Writing Studio book”, which turns every episode into a .script file, rebuilds the season structure as a beat board, converts characters and locations into ordinary notes, and relinks paired foreshadowing notes so the setups still point at their payoffs. It copies rather than moves — the original stays where it is.
Beta Readers is still its own studio. Two things did change in there: the dimension help and the next-step actions that used to fall back to English are now written in Arabic and Spanish, and every report ends with a quick question, will you revise your draft based on it?
2. Six file types, one tree
Most writing apps hand you text files and hope you keep the rest in your head. This release gives the rest of it somewhere to live.
Inside one book
.md.script.map.geomap.timeline.beats.md manuscript — the chapter you are actually writing. Tabs, split view, whole-book search, focus mode.
.script screenplay (new) — real scenes and elements rather than a text file pretending to be a screenplay. The scene board reorders by dragging, and summary, location, time of day and cast are all editable on the card. Cast is read off the dialogue, so it updates when the dialogue does; someone present but silent can be added by hand and will not go stale when you rewrite the lines. Runtime is estimated as you type — dialogue and action counted at different rates, plus an allowance per scene — and the title bar shows the running total against your target.
.map relationship board (upgraded to a whiteboard) — marquee-select several nodes and move them together, snap to alignment guides, undo and redo with Ctrl+Z, drop text straight onto the canvas, drag a note in and it becomes a card, export SVG and PNG. It works on a phone: one finger pans, two fingers zoom, long press is right-click.
.geomap world map (new) — draw the world the story happens in. The brushes today are water, land and mountain, plus forest; thirty-seven place symbols across eight categories. Rivers clip themselves where they meet the sea, and labels thin out by zoom tier. You can generate a whole map from a seed or paint it cell by cell. Exports to PNG. The map is still in beta, and more brushes are coming.
.timeline story timeline (new) — chapters, scenes and notes on one axis. Swimlanes show how a character’s line crosses a storyline, and you can solo a character to follow just theirs. Give your world its own calendar: how many months, how many days in each, how long a week runs, what the era is called. The calendar is only a display format — change it or turn it off at any time and the events and their order are untouched. You can also skip dates entirely and just order things.
.beats beat board (new) — acts are columns, beats are cards, and a card can hold the chapter file it turns into. Drag a chapter in from the tree; when the shape of the book changes, drag beats to a different act. Four public-domain structure templates are built in: three-act, a local six-beat television structure, kishōtenketsu, and Freytag’s pyramid.
Images, PDFs and data files open in the tree too. And every type takes comments now — click one and it jumps to the exact card it belongs to.
3. The AI stopped only writing sentences
This was the hardest part of the release and the part most worth explaining.
The AI used to handle structured files by overwriting them whole, which meant anything you had not mentioned got quietly erased. It now uses field-level tools: ask for a new scene, a city moved south, an extra beat in act two, and it touches only the line or the node it addressed.
All five structured types — screenplay, beat board, relationship board, world map, timeline — are editable this way.
The changes appear on the page. New items show up as dashed cards in the position they belong; edits and deletions are marked on the original card, with Accept and Skip right there. No more expanding a JSON blob in the chat panel to work out what it did. There is a one-click “accept everything in this file”, and any change that no longer lines up is listed separately.
A batch is all-or-nothing. When the AI does several things at once they are presented together; if step four fails, steps one to three are not applied. Later steps can refer to something created earlier in the same batch — “add a character, then put them in that group”.
Smaller things you will actually run into: a reply that starts repeating itself now stops on its own; a failed tool call explains why instead of showing a bare red cross; the relationship-board AI can see coordinates, so it can put something “below him” rather than scattering a layout you spent an hour on; and you can ask it to create a blank timeline, relationship board or beat board.
4. The writing journey
This section is worth reading on its own.
Platforms have started asking authors to declare how AI was involved. Slima records the process as it happens — typed, pasted, imported and AI-written counted separately — so what you have is a set of figures rather than a memory of last spring.
- Creation playback: play the whole project along a time axis and watch the book grow. Weeks you did not write flatten out; weeks you did climb.
- Keystroke-level replay: step through how a passage was written. Anything the AI wrote is marked in violet. Plain-text manuscripts only for now.
- A public journey page and a badge: show the process to readers, and put the badge on a profile or a blog. The link points back to slima.ai, which is what makes it hard to fake.
- Provenance certificates: issue a publicly verifiable record of the work’s history, anchored to a ledger chain (a SHA-256 hash chain with server-side timestamps). Included for every work on Pro and Team, or buy one per book.
- Reference material: how many settings, world notes and character files you built for this book. “Files grew from 3 to 15” is itself part of the process.
- Declaration help: the process facts laid out against what Shōsetsuka ni Narō, Kakuyomu and Amazon KDP each ask for.
One sentence on the limits: these are process records and a basis for a declaration, not a verdict on how a piece of writing was made. We do not present them as one, and we would rather you did not either.
5. Writing experience
- Reading and proofreading mode: switch the editor into a reading layout for a full pass.
- Read-aloud: click a paragraph and it starts from there. In a screenplay each character can have their own voice, with slug lines and action going to the narrator. It uses the voices already in your operating system, so it costs nothing.
- Voice input with punctuation: say “comma” and get one. Install the offline speech model and the engine starts inferring punctuation from your pauses — and the audio never leaves the device. Your dictation language can be set separately from the interface language.
- Chapter progress: a target word count and a state per chapter (drafting, in review, done). The editor sidebar and the manuscript table both show the whole book.
- Split view, notes unified to four colours, reading position kept when you switch files.
6. Teams
The team workspace was redesigned: ten flat tabs became three sidebar groups — Work, Team Brain, Admin — and every pane has its own URL.
- Confidential skills: a manager can mark a skill confidential. A member’s AI conversation still uses it and still follows it, but the text never reaches their device and only managers can open it.
- Audit: every read of a team skill — who, when, from where, whether it was withheld or throttled, and which members have not acknowledged the confidentiality notice.
- Team tabs on your own bookshelf: one tab per team. Opening a team book routes by role — people who can write get the editor, reviewers get a read-only workspace.
- Chapter review: submitted chapters collect in the team overview across every book, and approving or sending back is a state on the chapter itself.
The Team plan is in closed beta. We onboard one team at a time, by hand. If you want in, the Team page has the details and the form.
7. Showing the work
- A “showcase” tab: the book becomes a 3D physical object you can leaf through, with the real manuscript inside and jumps to any chapter. Ten built-in cover styles or upload your own; gold, silver or white edges.
- A privacy centre that lists what you have made public: share links, public journey pages and certificates in one place, each openable or revocable on the spot.
- The shared reading page was relaid.
8. Sync and data safety
This section is “what we fixed”, and it is not a small one.
- A cross-device edit conflict no longer overwrites silently — you are told, and you choose which version to keep, or keep both.
- Sync no longer moves files out of their folders, and does not invent duplicate chapters.
- When server data is rolled back to an earlier state, the local manuscript survives intact and re-uploads itself.
- Restore a deleted chapter from history and its notes, unsaved draft and open tab come back with it.
- Repeated sync failures pause the retry loop and tell you, instead of spinning every 30 seconds.
- Content or images that are missing from the cloud with no local copy now say so, instead of quietly becoming blank.
9. Languages and accessibility
- Japanese is live — six interface languages now: 繁體中文, English, Español, العربية, 한국어, 日本語.
- Arabic RTL was corrected throughout: directional arrows mirror properly, signed numbers no longer reverse, spacing and alignment use logical directions.
- Language preference now follows the language you actually chose.
- Sixty-two places that used to fall back to English are filled in for Arabic and Spanish.
10. Mobile
Not the desktop version made smaller — rebuilt. The editor, file tree, AI panel and team area were all laid out again. Pop-up menus became sheets that rise from the bottom. Tap targets were enlarged; several were 22×22 before. Every hover-only interaction gained a way in on a touchscreen.
11. Habits
- The slime you have been raising is now the AI Coach’s avatar. Its face changes while it thinks, reads your manuscript, edits and replies; it cheers when you accept an AI change, and you can pet it.
- Writing milestones went from four tiers to ten, from a thousand words up to a million. All of them are measured from your current manuscript word count, and archived books count too. Credits are claimed by hand now: Insight marks which tiers are ready and offers a claim-all, and each milestone only counts once.
- The daily quote stopped being a modal over your bookshelf. It is a light toast at the top, brought by your slime, and you can swap it or dismiss it.
- The daily word goal is yours to set and change, right in the slime house’s daily quest, with a nudge if you never set one. The editor sidebar’s daily goal now uses the same editor and the same presets.
12. Account, plans and feedback
- Public byline: public journey pages, certificates and system email all use the pen name you set, falling back to your account name only if you leave it blank.
- Billing in one place: the subscription and every add-on now live on the same page.
- Cancelling a subscription or deleting an account lets you say why. Entirely optional.
- The free-allowance hint in AI chat uses your plan’s real quota.
- Going over a plan limit picks which books turn read-only by bookshelf order, and shows you which ones.
- You can rate an AI reply up or down. A downvote can optionally attach that part of the conversation so we can diagnose it — off by default.
Before you update
Updating from 3.4.5 to 4.0.0
Read these four first.
- Going from 3.4.5 straight to 4.0.0 runs a twelve-step upgrade on your local database. The first launch takes longer than usual. Do not close the tab partway through.
- Do not roll back to an older version afterwards. The old version would run on new-format data, which is worse than not opening at all.
- Script Studio is sunsetting: move older projects with the built-in converter. A banner inside points at it.
- An installed PWA will not update its icon on its own. Remove and reinstall it if you want the new one.
What is next
Three companion posts, each on one thing:
- The AI now edits one field, not the whole file
- The writing journey, and what platforms now ask you to declare
- A screenplay is a file now
The product pages: Writing Studio and screenwriting inside the Writing Studio.
This release sat for a long time, so there will be corners we did not test. Write to [email protected] or say something on Discord — for the first few weeks of 4.0 we are watching.