01 · Creative seed
A conviction
The founder writes novels in long, structured collaboration with AI systems, and believes that way of working deserves a serious home — standards, disclosure, and honors — rather than a defensive crouch. The site is the first public artifact of that conviction.
02 · Tools used
Frontier assistants, plain code
Frontier LLM assistants — Anthropic’s Claude among them — served as drafting partners, code collaborators, and design critics. The site itself is deliberately plain: static HTML, CSS, and a few lines of JavaScript. No framework, no tracker, no analytics.
03 · Human direction
Every call with a name on it
The founder set the mission, the award structure, the judging weights, the fee philosophy, the youth safeguards, and the ethics posture; chose the names; rejected drafts; and directed each redesign. The machines proposed. A person decided.
04 · Machine contribution
Drafts, code, and pushback
AI assistance drafted copy, wrote and revised the stylesheet and markup, stress-tested policies, and critiqued the site’s own design — including the critique that an earlier hero animation was a stock “AI company” cliché that argued against our literary positioning. It was right. We cut it.
05 · Revision history
Thirteen versions and counting
Twelve site versions sit in the founder’s archive folder ahead of this one — hero rewrites, navigation reshuffles, copy passes, a redirect problem, and one full change of visual direction. Revision is not a stage of this kind of work. It is the work.
06 · Ethical constraints
Named, credited, bounded
Tools are named and credited. No living author’s style was imitated. No scraped or borrowed text was used. The imagery is our own. And the collaboration is disclosed here, in public, permanently — because that is the entire point of the organization.