We’ve got a huge update for you this week, with a few headline items below you definitely don’t want to miss.

Excellent Credit Efficiency

Earlier this week we launched Ballad 1.1, Sudowrite’s very own new AI model powering the Excellent Prose Mode. The response has been incredible, with many of you saying it has quickly become your daily driver. There was constructive feedback too, however—primarily that the credit cost of generating multiple Write cards could really add up (especially with big Story Bibles or longer chapters linked in continuity).

Based on that feedback, we made some key changes to how Excellent works. The result? You’ll now save up to 70% on credit costs when generating multiple Write cards with Excellent. The more cards at once, the bigger the savings.

Improved Plugin Editor

If you’ve ever clicked “Create Plugin” in the More Tools menu, you know how simple that first step is—say what you need, and Sudowrite builds it for you. Finalizing your custom writing tool in the editor was less intuitive though, so we just launched an improved Plugin editor that dramatically simplifies the process.

We’ve done away with a complex table of variables, and made it easy to pick from a selector which story inputs you want your plugin to use. New input fields will appear below the Plugin Instructions only for the story inputs you want your plugin to use—so you can force someone to select at least a hundred words to use it, or increase the limit so your Plugin can read a complete manuscript.

Updates to our documentation, including a video walkthrough of this new Plugin creation flow, are coming very soon!

Improvements

Claude Opus 4.8 - We’ve added Anthropic’s latest, “greatest” AI model to Sudowrite. Early reviews suggest improvements in prose quality, instruction-following, and consistency across longer outputs—but feedback differs based on genre. Try it out now in Write, Draft or Plugins.

Model Context on History Cards - Can’t remember if you used Opus 4.7 or 4.8 on that last Write click? We just added a new Model chiclet to the Write and Draft cards that appear in your History column, so you’ll always know which AI model wrote the card in question.

Chat Web Research - We heard your feedback that Chat being able to search the web would be a game changer, so we gave it the ability to do so. You can now ask Chat to go research and synthesize things from the internet. Try it with genre conventions or trope data.

Fixes

Rewrite Error Fix - We fixed an issue earlier this week that caused some of you to get a “Something went wrong” error when trying to use Rewrite.

Word Count While Drafting - The word count was not updating consistently while the Draft tool was generating chapter prose. We fixed that and it now gives you a much better real-time picture of your document length during generation.

POV Persistence - We fixed an issue where, after manually setting the chapter POVs in your Story Bible’s Outline, refreshing the page or navigating away could result in those being reset. Your POV will now persist as intended.

Chat History Cutoff - We fixed a bug that was preventing people with very long chat exchanges from scrolling all the way back to the beginning of their chat thread.

More Menu Dismissal - Clicking the three-dot (•••) More menu on a History card would expand a menu with a delete option that could not be dismissed. We fixed that and made it easier to dismiss that menu if you didn’t want to delete your History card.

Large Project Duplication - Projects with over 150 documents could get stuck during the duplicate process, but still display a “success” message. We fixed that so large projects work as expected now, but also, if a duplication fails the message is now correct.

Thanks as always for bringing these issues to our attention. Keep the great feedback coming!