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I've been experimenting with something and I'm genuinely torn on whether it's brilliant or terrible for writing.
The concept: you build a world — characters, rules, factions, whatever — and then it keeps evolving on its own in 6-12 hour cycles. You come back the next day and things have changed. Not randomly — consistently with the world's logic, but in ways you didn't plan.
Example: I had a dragon-cat advisor character (don't ask) who disagreed with a kingdom's tax policy. I walked away for the night. Came back the next morning to find he'd attempted a coup, failed spectacularly, and was hiding in the royal sewers plotting his next move. I never wrote any of that. The world's internal logic just... did it.
On one hand, it's incredible for breaking writer's block. You're not staring at a blank page — you're reacting to a world that moved without you. It feels more like being a journalist in your own universe than a god.
On the other hand, I wonder if it undermines the craft. Part of writing is the deliberate choice of what happens next. If your world is making those choices for you, are you still the author?
For the writers here: would you want a world with genuine agency that surprises you? Or does that take away the thing that makes writing yours?
Also curious — for anyone who uses AI in their worldbuilding, how do you handle consistency? The biggest challenge I've hit is making sure mutations don't contradict established history. Every choice needs to be remembered perfectly or the whole thing falls apart.