README.md

metadata

title: Cosmere Codex
emoji: ✨
colorFrom: yellow
colorTo: pink
sdk: gradio
sdk_version: 6.18.0
python_version: '3.13'
app_file: app.py
pinned: true
license: mit
short_description: Chat in character with the Shards of the Cosmere
tags:
  - track:wood
  - achievement:offgrid
  - achievement:offbrand

✨ Cosmere Codex — Voices of the Shards

A living star map of the Cosmere. Click a system and talk — live and in character — with the god-like Shard who dwells there. Each Shard is performed by a small language model kept fully in voice: ask anything, and it answers on the fly in its own distinct character. The AI isn't a feature here; it is the experience.

Built for the Hugging Face Build Small Hackathon — creative track, "Thousand Token Wood."

🎬 Demo & write-up

• Demo video + social post: LinkedIn submission post
• I also added the video into the space, under screen recording mp4

The idea

The Cosmere is full of god-like beings called Shards, each the embodiment of a single intent — Ruin, Devotion, Odium, Cultivation. Cosmere Codex turns that pantheon into something you can actually converse with. The front page is a slowly-orbiting "solar system of systems": each world drawn as its own animated symbol circling a central star. Click one and you drop into a themed conversation with its Shard — Odium trying to seduce you into surrendering your guilt, Cultivation answering only in riddles of seeds and seasons, Hoid deflecting every question with a story.

The design bet: a small model doesn't reliably know Cosmere canon, so we don't ask it to. Each Shard's personality and key lore live in its system prompt, so the model simply performs a fully-specified character instead of inventing facts. The result stays in-voice and on-canon while running on a tiny model.

The tech

• Model: Qwen/Qwen3-8B (≤ 32B) in non-thinking mode for snappy, in-character replies, served with Hugging Face transformers on ZeroGPU (@spaces.GPU), streamed token-by-token via the tokenizer's chat template. The model id is one easy-to-swap constant in app.py.
• Custom UI (Off Brand): gr.Blocks pushed well past stock Gradio — a CSS/SVG deep-space scene; seven hand-built, animated vector system symbols (turning gears, orbiting planet-dots, pulsing suns) arranged in a circle that slowly revolves around a central star; per-Shard color theming; and a tiny JS click-bridge so the custom symbols drive navigation. Collapses to a clean tappable grid on mobile.
• Lore-in-prompt: characters and canon are authored in shards.py, separate from the UI, so voices are easy to tune.

The Shards

• Harmony (Scadrial) — the god who was once a mortal scholar, holding stability and ruin in balance.
• Odium (Roshar) — divine hatred that calls itself Passion and offers freedom from guilt.
• Cultivation (Roshar) — the patient gardener who prunes people toward growth.
• Devotion & Dominion (Sel) — two Splintered Shards, finishing each other's broken thoughts.
• Endowment (Nalthis) — the giver of Breath, watching what mortals make of her gifts.
• Autonomy (Taldain) — the many-faced Shard who will never tell you who it truly is.
• Hoid (Drominad) — no Shard rules this system, so the Cosmere's eternal wanderer is filling in… unfortunately.

Attribution & disclaimer

Lore facts adapted from the Coppermind wiki (CC BY-NC-SA). An unofficial, non-commercial fan project — not affiliated with or endorsed by Brandon Sanderson or Dragonsteel. The Cosmere and its worlds are their creations.

Configuration reference: https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/spaces-config-reference