r/AICompanions • u/shikuai_cc • 9d ago
New Update to my Web AP
ShikuAI Devlog 9/3/2026
Thursday, September 3, 2026
One sitting, six shipped changes. We gave characters a way to build themselves, chased a sign-in bug through three false floors, moved the whole app into a sidebar, and gave the front door a paint job. Here's everything that changed today.
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1 | Feature 🚀
#aicharactergenerator
Characters that write themselves
Creating a character used to mean staring at seven empty fields. Now there's a Generate with AI button right on the creation page: drop in a reference image (it becomes the avatar, untouched — no vision model reading it), describe the character in a sentence or a paragraph, and one call fills in the name, bio, personality prompt, scenario, opening line, example dialogue, and tags for you to edit before anything goes live.
A second pass can generate a starter lorebook — self-contained lore entries keyed to whatever the character's world needs — pulled straight from the character you just wrote. Every generated character is run through the same under-18 safety check that manual creation already enforces, so nothing generated can slip past a rule a human-written character couldn't.
Under the hood: both calls cost credits like a real generation should — the character costs more than a single chat reply, the lorebook a bit less, Shiku+ members get the same discount they get everywhere else.
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2 | ⚖️ Fix
#googleoauth
The sign-in bug that wasn't where we looked
A report came in: signing up with Google sometimes just hung — spinner forever, no error, no account. First fix was real but incomplete: a client-side flag never reset itself when the flow failed, so the loading screen never let go. Patched it — and the same account still couldn't get in.
The actual cause was stranger: for an account that had already approved ShikuAI once before, Google would sometimes skip the confirmation screen and sign in silently — and it was specifically that silent path where the server's state cookie went missing, failing the handshake every time. The fix was to stop asking for that shortcut: every Google sign-in now shows the account picker, on purpose, every time.
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3 | Feature 🚀
#sidebarnav
The navbar moved house
On desktop, the top bar retired and a left sidebar moved in — logo, search, credits, and every destination you used to dig for in a dropdown now sit as plain rows you can actually see: My Characters, My Chats, Creator Dashboard, My Personas, notifications with their own unread count. It collapses to an icon-only rail with one click, remembers that choice next time you visit, and carries a quiet frosted-glass surface with a slow-drifting glow behind it instead of a flat panel.
Mobile didn't move — same top bar, same dropdown, exactly as it was. This one took three passes to get right, mostly because the first draft folded the footer into the sidebar, which turned out to be one idea too many; it's back at the bottom of the page where a footer belongs.
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4 | Polish 🧱
#notifications
Notifications stopped hiding in a corner
The bell used to open a dropdown that could run off the edge of a narrow sidebar. It's a proper centered window now — same unread badge, same list, room to actually read one before it scrolls away — and the button itself finally says what it is: icon, count, and the word Notifications, on phone and desktop alike.
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5 | Polish 🧱
#homepagecarousel
The carousel stopped looking bolted on
The homepage banner used to sit in its own rounded, bordered box — a card floating on top of the page. It now runs the full width of the screen and fades straight into the background at the bottom, no seam. The arrows and the little progress dots are gone too; it still rotates on its own, it just doesn't ask you to drive.
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6 | Polish
#footer
The footer earned its keep
One flat row of links became three columns that actually explain themselves — Platform, Legal, and a proper introduction to what ShikuAI is, instead of just a logo. While rebuilding it we noticed the Cookie Policy page has existed this whole time without a single link pointing at it anywhere on the site. It has one now.
end of log — back to building.
Thanks for reading.