storytime

Storytime

A 260K-parameter transformer running inside Claude Code as a mod. It sits above the prompt and writes a short story about whatever Claude is working on: the tool Claude just called picks the kind of hero, the file it touched names the hero, and a word from your prompt is what the hero finds. Every token is generated locally by the mod's own TypeScript; nothing goes to the API.

Storytime · TinyStories-260K · local transformer · 0 API tokens
Once upon a time, there was a little pencil named Auth. Auth loved to draw
pictures of the sun and the moon. One day, Auth saw a big tree…▍
seeded by Edit auth-service.ts · 4300 tok/s · /story

The model is Andrej Karpathy's stories260K from karpathy/tinyllamas (dim 64, 5 layers, 8 heads, 4 KV heads, vocab 512), the same checkpoint gbc-transformer runs on a Game Boy Color at one token every 2 minutes 49 seconds. Here it runs at a few thousand tokens a second and is throttled to two tokens per 80 ms so it reads as typing.

Install

Mods are built on function hooks, which are early access in Claude Code 2.1.272 and later, so start Claude Code with the flag:

CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_FUNCTION_HOOKS=1 claude

Then, inside Claude Code, add this repository as a marketplace and install the plugin:

/plugin marketplace add maddiedreese/cc-storytime
/plugin install storytime@cc-storytime

Or run it from a clone without installing:

git clone https://github.com/maddiedreese/cc-storytime
CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_FUNCTION_HOOKS=1 claude --plugin-dir ./cc-storytime

Use

Work as usual. The band reseeds on each prompt you send and on tool calls, at most once every twelve seconds.

• /story writes a new story.
• /story <name> writes one about that hero.
• /story off hides the band (remembered across sessions); /story on brings it back.

Heroes by tool: Edit is a pencil, Write a pen, Read a book, Bash a robot, Grep a dog, Glob a bird, WebFetch a fish, Agent a bear, your own prompt a girl. A file named auth-service.ts makes a hero named Auth; git status makes one named Git. Developer words in your prompt become story things: a bug stays a bug, a test is a puzzle, a branch is a tree, a deploy is a boat.

How it is built

| file | what it is | | --- | --- | | hooks/register.ts | The hooks module: session.start binds $ and registers /story; turn.start and tool.call reseed; ui.render of AbovePrompt draws the band over whatever is beneath it; a $.clock.every ticks generation. | | hooks/model.ts | The transformer: RMSNorm, RoPE, grouped-query attention with a KV cache, SwiGLU, tied embeddings. Float32 typed arrays; a port of run.c. | | hooks/tokenizer.ts | The llama2.c BPE tokenizer with byte fallback. | | hooks/story.ts | One story: prefill, then a token per step, stopping on EOS or a sentence end. | | hooks/seed.ts | Activity to opening line. | | hooks/views.tsx | The band's three rows. | | hooks/weights.ts | Generated: the int8 row-quantized weights (276 KB) and the tokenizer, base64, since a hooks module has no file access of its own for binaries. | | tools/pack.py | Writes weights.ts from stories260K.bin and tok512.bin. | | tools/verify.ts | node tools/verify.ts: checks the port's greedy output against the C reference and times it. |

The hooks environment has no Node and no DOM, only web globals, so the whole runtime is plain ES2023 on typed arrays. Nothing here uses WebAssembly.

Regenerating the weights

curl -LO https://huggingface.co/karpathy/tinyllamas/resolve/main/stories260K/stories260K.bin
curl -LO https://huggingface.co/karpathy/tinyllamas/resolve/main/stories260K/tok512.bin
python3 tools/pack.py stories260K.bin tok512.bin hooks/weights.ts

Tests

CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_FUNCTION_HOOKS=1 claude plugin test .

tsc -p tsconfig.json typechecks against .claude/types/claude-code.d.ts, which /plugin-types writes inside a session with function hooks enabled.

Credits

• TinyStories-260K and its tokenizer: Andrej Karpathy, karpathy/tinyllamas.
• The idea of drawing above the prompt with function hooks: sezaakgun's cc-arcade.

License

MIT