Ask a general purpose chatbot to help with chapter twenty four of a novel and it will have forgotten who the characters are, what colour the sky is in your world, and that one of them died in chapter nine. NovelAI's lorebook system exists specifically to fix that, and it is the most thought through solution to long form consistency I have used. You define entries for people, places, concepts and rules, set the conditions under which they get pulled into context, and the system assembles the relevant background as the story moves. That is a structural answer to a structural problem, and it is notable that the big commercial writing assistants still have nothing comparable.
The control surface generally is more honest than the competition. Sampling settings, memory allocation, author's note behaviour, module selection. These are exposed rather than hidden behind a friendly slider, which is the right call for a tool aimed at people who will use it for hundreds of hours. Someone writing a long project needs deterministic behaviour and the ability to diagnose why a passage came out wrong, and you cannot do that when everything is abstracted away.
The documentation is the weak half and it is a strange weakness given how strong the underlying design is. Official material tends to describe what a setting does without conveying why you would change it or what a good configuration looks like for a given kind of project. The community has filled that gap with guides that are frequently excellent, written by people who have clearly wrestled with a two hundred thousand word manuscript, but relying on forum posts and wikis for your core onboarding is a real cost in time and in confidence about whether the advice is current. The conceptual ramp is steep.
A new user meets lorebooks, memory, author's notes, modules and sampling parameters more or less at once, with little guidance on which of these to ignore for the first month. Most people would be better served by writing for a week with defaults and then learning the lorebook properly, and nothing tells them that. The absence of craft guidance is the gap I care about most. Every piece of material here teaches you to operate the system and none of it teaches you to write.
Pacing, scene structure, whether a chapter earns its length, why a character reads flat. Those are the things that determine whether the finished manuscript is worth reading, and a tool that makes producing text easier without improving judgement about text produces longer bad drafts. That is not unique to NovelAI, it is endemic to the category, but the depth of the technical material here makes the omission more conspicuous. Being subscription only with no real free tier means you cannot evaluate whether the lorebook workflow suits you without paying, which is a fair business decision and an annoying one for a tool whose value is only apparent after weeks of use.
Three point two. A genuinely clever answer to the hardest problem in long form AI writing, documented well below the standard of its own design, and silent on whether the writing coming out the other end is any good.