AI-Crafted Poetry Book in 10 Hours: Open-Source Skill with 6 Song Dynasty Templates

Project Overview

The author, known as Lao Zhang from AI Evaluation, experimented with long-context LLMs (Kimi K3.1 Pro) to produce a complete poetry collection titled Understanding Su Shi Through Poetry . The project consumed 10 hours 35 minutes, 317 model calls, and 169.7 million tokens (97.7% cache reads). The final book spans 1,448 pages and contains 3,202 pieces: 2,824 poems, 362 ci poems, and 16 prose works. Eighty-two major pieces receive scholarly commentary, textual notes, and red-ink annotations; 2,651 have cross-references to classical sources; 2,394 are dated; 808 remain undated.

Poetry Collection Statistics

Total pieces: 3,202 (2,824 poems, 362 ci, 16 prose)

Annotated major pieces: 82

Cross-referenced pieces: 2,651

Dated pieces: 2,394

Undated pieces: 808

Six Song Dynasty Aesthetic Templates

Each template defines paper color, ink tone, binding lines, and cover composition as a theme system:

1. song-mist (烟雨留白) – off-white paper, pale ink mountains, fine rain, river boat, vermilion seal. Default theme; ideal for poet chronologies and classical anthologies needing ample whitespace.

2. celadon (青瓷天青) – pale grey-green paper with layered celadon hills. Recommended for technical monographs and course handouts.

3. ink-zen (墨禅寂照) – grey-white paper, single brush-stroke mountain, enso circle. Minimalist; suits philosophy, essays, and minimalist technical docs.

4. cinnabar-seal (朱砂印谱) – rice paper with vermilion, modeled on Song collector seal albums. Cover bears small seals for "poetry", "heart", "collection". Fits anthologies and special editions.

5. moon-river (月夜赤壁) – blue-grey paper, bright moon, water ripples, night boat. Homage to Red Cliff Rhapsody ; contrast adjusted after first proof.

6. bamboo (竹影清风) – pale green paper with sparse bamboo shadows avoiding text areas. Suits poetry notes and lighter column collections.

Development Process

Data Collection and Source Verification

Rule: no character in the main text may come from model memory . The author downloaded 11 classical repositories and 18 library pages, using Complete Works of Su Shi , Annotated Su Shi Poetry , Supplement to Annotated Su Shi Poetry , Su Shi Ci as primary texts, and History of Song: Biography of Su Shi , Su Zhe's epitaph, chronologies, and Extended Comprehensive Mirror for historical facts. Open corpora provided retrieval baselines; classical texts enabled cross-collation. Every repository commit hash, page revision, and file SHA-256 was logged so any poem can be traced to its exact source file and page.

Deduplication and Chronological Ordering

Deduplication pitfalls:

Same title, different content – cannot merge by title alone.

Poem sequences – must keep all numbered parts.

Same tune title (cipai) – dozens of distinct poems share a cipai.

Solution: joint identification by title + first line + full text . Four-layer storage: raw text, normalized text, display text, editor annotations – each isolated.

Chronology challenges:

Some works only locatable to a life phase, not a year.

Prefaces recalling past events – must not confuse composition date with recalled date.

Era changes, lunar year boundaries, duplicate sexagenary cycles handled individually.

Insufficient evidence → placed in "undated" category, never forced.

Resulting distribution across Su Shi's life:

Volume 1: Meishan & Leaving Shu (1037–1059) – 42 works
Volume 2: Fame in Capital & Fengxiang (1060–1065) – 148
Volume 3: Reform Turmoil & External Posts (1066–1074) – 404
Volume 4: Mizhou Years (1075–1076) – 114
Volume 5: Xuzhou/Huzhou Achievements & Crow Terrace Poetry Case (1077–1079) – 289
Volume 6: Huangzhou Breakthrough (1080–1084) – 295
Volume 7: Yuanyou Restoration & Four Prefectures (1085–1093) – 623
Volume 8: Huizhou Mist & Rain (1094–1096) – 123
Volume 9: Danzhou & Northward Return (1097–1100) – 120
Volume 10: Changzhou Final Works (1101) – 43

Time Breakdown

Phase                                 Time
Requirements, env check, research     15 min
Project skeleton, corpus download     15 min
Poem extraction, matching, chronology 2 hr 7 min
Major-piece annotation & supplements  8 min
Cover design, vertical draft, v1 book 2 hr 57 min
Testing, font fixes, horizontal rebuild 4 hr 46 min
Final acceptance, preview, delivery   4 min
Total                                 10 hr 35 min
Note: download, compile, and some writing ran in parallel.
Typesetting 28%, testing/fixing 45% → together >70%.

Token Consumption Analysis

Type            Tokens
Regular input   3,628,228
Output          274,751
Cache reads     165,809,377
Total           169,712,356
97.7% cache reads. Long tasks repeatedly feed book structure, tool returns, classical indexes, error logs – most served from cache. Fresh input+output ≈ 3.9M tokens (additional template/technical-article runs not counted).

Extending to Technical Articles

To make the pipeline a reusable Skill, the author fed his own Markdown article vLLM Surpasses DeepSeek Custom Engine, Still the Top Choice for Local LLM Deployment into the system, producing a 15-page illustrated booklet using the celadon theme with a personal seal.

Installation and Usage

Quick Install via Skills

Skill hosted in GitHub repo z-skills. Install with:

npx skills add tjxj/z-skills --skill poetry-book

Manual Installation

python3 scripts/install.py

Defaults to ~/.agents/skills/poetry-book/; use --dest to override.

Dependencies

latexmk

, LuaLaTeX, Ghostscript

Python 3 with packages: fontTools, PyMuPDF, Pillow; technical-article mode adds PyYAML System fonts: Source Han Serif SC VF, Early Summer Serif, LXGW WenKai

Commands

List Available Themes

python3 "$HOME/.agents/skills/poetry-book/scripts/build_style.py" --list

Render Poetry Book (input: structured book.json)

python3 "$HOME/.agents/skills/poetry-book/scripts/render_book.py" \
  --input "/absolute/path/book.json" \
  --theme "song-mist" \
  --output "/absolute/path/new-output-directory"

Render Technical Article (input: Markdown)

python3 "$HOME/.agents/skills/poetry-book/scripts/render_article.py" \
  --input "/absolute/path/article.md" \
  --theme "celadon" \
  --title "Article Main Title" \
  --subtitle "Article Subtitle" \
  --author "Author or Column Name" \
  --seal "Seal Text" \
  --output "/absolute/path/new-output-directory"

Validation and Output

Output directory must not exist or be empty to prevent accidental overwrite.

Network images: HTTPS only, max 25 MB each; --offline uses only local images. --require "specific phrase" enforces presence of a key sentence for content acceptance.

Each run produces a PDF, validation-report.json, and preview images. Report's passed: true signals success.

With the open-sourced Poetry Book skill, anyone can compile a poet's collected works or turn a series of articles into a beautifully typeset electronic booklet using authentic Song Dynasty aesthetics.