Styles

A picture prompt is not one idea. It is a render recipe, plus a character, plus a place, plus the lettering, plus the angle the camera is at — and each of those outlives the picture it was first written for. The same character stands in thirty videos.

So kilna keeps them as styles: one dictionary, owned by the workspace rather than by any work, that a prompt is built out of. Each style is a brick of it.

What a style is

A style has four things:

• A type — Image style, Character, Environment, Typography, Camera angle, Pose, Layers, Frame composition, Look in the Studio profile. The type is a word of the craft and lives in the profile document, so a craft that works differently names its own.
• A name — what you call it. Two styles of one type may not share a name; across types they may, so a character and a look can both be Ranger.
• A description — the text that goes into a prompt word for word. This is the whole of what a style contributes.
• References — the pictures it was written from. Drop them on the open style from a folder, paste one with Ctrl+V, or add them with Add pictures. They are copied into the workspace like every other file, so a style survives you tidying your downloads.

There is a fifth field, the steer, and it is the odd one: it says what to look at when the style is described — “only the jacket”, “ignore the background”. It reaches the assistant when it writes the description. It never reaches a generator, because it is an instruction about the description rather than part of one.

Making and editing a style

The dictionary is a grid of cards, each led by up to three of its pictures, and the last card is dashed: New style. Drop pictures on it from a folder, or paste one with Ctrl+V while no style is open, and a new style is made around them and opened, called Untitled style with the name ready to be typed over. Pressing the dashed card picks the pictures from disk instead; New style at the top makes one with none.

A style opens beside the dictionary rather than over it: the grid narrows to a column, so the other styles stay in reach, and the open one takes the rest of the window. There is no Save button - every field writes itself a moment after you stop typing, and the line beside the name says when it has. A picked type or status is written at once. Escape or the cross closes it.

A name the dictionary cannot take - none at all, or one another style of the type already has - is said under it, and the style keeps its last name until it has a new one; the rest of what you type goes on saving meanwhile.

The type is the point

The type is not a label for sorting. It carries a hint: what to describe for a style of that type. Given the same photograph, image-style asks for the render technique and character asks for the person — and never the other way round.

That is what makes one dictionary richer than several flat ones. An assistant told “Environment: a flooded car park at dusk” knows the sentence is the place and not the person, and can write one prompt instead of gluing three together.

The hint shows under the type picker while you are choosing, because it is what the description will be held to.

Where it stands

A style is a draft until it carries a description, ready once it does, and retired when you put it away without losing what it was.

Only ready styles are offered when a prompt is being built. A draft is unfinished by definition, and a picker quietly full of things nobody has touched is how a dictionary rots.

Writing a description — by hand or from the references — lets a draft out into ready in the same move. Describing a retired style does not revive it.

Describing from references

Add the pictures, pick the type, and press Describe from the references. The assistant is given the type’s own question, your steer, the pictures and whatever the style says today, and it writes the description that style will carry. Whatever you typed is saved first, so the description is written from the style as you left it — the steer you typed a moment ago included. The style stays open while it is written.

The answer arrives in its own chat, the way every AI action’s does, with Keep as its description under it; the bell says it is waiting, and its line opens that chat. Nothing is written until you keep it — the assistant never touches the workspace itself. Kept, the answer becomes the style’s description word for word, lets a draft out into ready, and is an edit like one made by hand: Ctrl+Z takes it back. A style open at the time shows the kept description in its box, unless you are typing in that box yourself.

With no references at all, the prompt says so rather than pretending: it asks for a description from the name and says plainly that there was nothing to look at.

Deleting a style

The bin beside the open style’s name moves it to the Trash together with its reference pictures, like every other deletion: the message offers Undo, and the Trash restores the style with its pictures for as long as you want.

To put a style away without deleting it, set it to retired instead: it keeps its description and pictures and stops being offered.

Building a prompt

On a video or a short, Build a prompt from styles — in the card’s AI actions — opens the picker: search the dictionary, click the parts you want, and press build. Only ready styles are offered.

The action takes the styles you picked and writes one prompt out of them.

Each part reaches the assistant under the word for what it contributes:

Environment — Flooded car park
Standing water to the ankles, concrete pillars, sodium light from one working lamp.

Character — The keeper
Sixty, weathered, close-cropped grey hair, a long grey coat worn open.

Image style — Cold north
Grainy monochrome film, sodium streetlight, heavy vignette.

The order you pick them in is kept. A person who picks the character first and the place second has said something about which matters more, and re-sorting it would throw that away — so the first is the spine of the picture and the last is a detail.

A style with no description yet still goes in, by name, marked as not described. A silent gap would read as “there is no character”, and you picked it on purpose.

A style is not a style prompt

The style version role on a song — the production paragraph kept beside its lyrics — is unchanged and is not the same thing. That is a finished prompt for one work. A style is a part that finished prompts get built from. The constructor turns the second into the first.

Where the dictionary lives

Styles in the rail, under Library. The screen appears only where the craft names style types; a profile with none has no dictionary, and kilna does not offer a door to an empty room.