What the AI Reads, What It May Touch, and Where Your Words Go.

Four Kinds of Work

Write continues from your caret, by the sentence, the paragraph, the beat, the rest of the scene or the next few scenes, in up to three variants. It can also plan a scene’s beats. The text sits there as ghost text until you accept it.

Rewrite works on a selection: tighten, shorten, expand, make it darker or lighter, sharpen the dialogue, proofread, tidy up a dictation. The result comes back as tracked changes, so you can see each word it wanted rid of.

Analyze reads and reports: a review, a summary, pacing, continuity, whether a scene has drifted from your voice. Results are comments or proposals. An analysis never edits the manuscript.

Chat is for arguing about the plot with something that won’t get tired of it, or comparing two takes of a scene.

What It Actually Sees

Shiro hasn’t read your book. It gets a selection, chosen afresh for each request. That means the project card, any skills and project memory, the scene’s details and beats, the World entries the text mentions or you’ve pinned (3 for small models, 10 for larger ones), the end of the previous scene, and up to about 2,000 words before your caret and 300 after.

Larger models work as agents, which means they can go and read further with tools and search the book by meaning. A small local model can’t. If it has never heard of your heroine’s brother, nobody told it.

It only imitates you if you ask. A voice skill learns from up to 12,000 of your words, leaving out any sentence Shiro wrote, and your voice is a subject worth thinking about first.

Some work runs without a click: reading scenes to fill their empty fields and note what characters know, and reading the book for search by meaning. All of it is set to local models only, so with no local model it doesn’t run. You can switch it off, or allow any model.

How Far It Goes Alone

• Manual. Every edit waits as a proposal, and you apply or reject it.
• Auto. Edits land one by one, each with an undo.
• Max. For long jobs. Shiro writes a plan with a checklist and an estimate, then edits land as it goes, with a checkpoint after each item and snapshots behind them. A plan that deletes something or touches more than one chapter waits for your OK. Max needs a model that can plan long tasks, and none of the local ones can yet.

Where Each Request Goes

• Your computer. Local models run through the bundled llama.cpp, Ollama or LM Studio, and the request stays on 127.0.0.1.
• Your own key. The app sends the request to the provider you picked: OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral or a custom endpoint. You pay them, and their terms apply.
• Shiro Cloud. No keys, a monthly allowance, paid plans. Chat goes through OpenRouter to the model, images through fal, clips through Replicate. Our server stores each call’s model, tokens and cost. It keeps prompts only if you turn on Help improve Shiro, which is off by default.

Shiro never trains models on your writing. That sentence is about Shiro, the only company it can speak for. What OpenRouter, the model makers behind it or the provider on your key may do is in their terms, so read them or stay local.

The Controls

What Shiro sent lists every request as it left: the text, the model, the destination, the tokens, the cost. Open it whenever you doubt this page.

ai: never in a scene’s front matter, or Hidden from Shiro in its menu, keeps that scene from every model, agent, search index and MCP client. It exists for the chapter about your mother.

Off is a real off, per project or everywhere: no AI code runs and nothing is sent. Writing without AI has its own page, because plenty of the app has nothing to do with any of this.

The authorship record notes which text you typed, pasted or took from Shiro, so you have an answer when a publisher or Amazon asks.

The Questions People Ask

Does Shiro train AI models on my writing?

Shiro doesn’t. That promise covers Shiro only. With hosted AI your text passes through OpenRouter to the model’s maker, and with your own key it goes to the provider you chose, so their terms decide what they may do with it. A local model sends it nowhere.

Does the AI read my whole book?

Not as a matter of course. Each request carries selected context, including about 2,000 words before your caret and 300 after. Larger models can read further with tools when the task calls for it, and “What Shiro sent” shows you what went.

Can I use Shiro with no AI at all?

Yes. Turn AI off for one project or for all of them. No AI code runs and nothing is sent. The editor, the Board, the World and the code-based continuity checks all carry on.

Do I have to pay for the AI?

Not for a local model, beyond the computer you already own. With your own key the provider bills you. Hosted AI needs a paid Cloud plan, and images and clips use credits. The pricing page has the details.