History

2022–2023 — Origins (CommonJS)

The project started in 2022 as a CommonJS Node app (require/module.exports). It paired a yargs CLI with an Express + Pug web UI to generate random/dynamic prompts for the Stable Diffusion WebUI and manage the resulting images.

This was not a small project — the overwhelming majority of the codebase, the prompt DSL, and the web app were built in a concentrated burst. By commit volume: ~178 commits in December 2022, ~160 in January 2023, then a long tail (~11 in March, ~2 in April 2023) before the project went quiet until the 2026 revival. The original layout was flat (everything at the repo root: dynamic-prompts/, prompt-modules/, helpers/, lists/, expansions/, presets/, web/); the src/+data/ split came only with the 2026 reorg. A Upgrade-2-0.md note, an update.bat, and a dev branch already existed, anticipating a 2.0.

The arc of that original effort, read from the git log:

• Dec 2022 — the engine and the content. The prompt mini-language took shape (expansions, the {list} system with once-only depletion, dynamic-prompt plugins), alongside a large content push: city/time/weather/building-style/render-color lists, the discovery and crediting of CC-licensed tag lists (u/Carlyone and others — see list-credits.md), and steadily improved person, landscape, house, and city generators. The danbooru/anime keyword path and emphasis/editing/alternating randomization were part of this period.
• Jan 2023 — the web app matured. Dynamic prompts gained the full vs partial classification the suggestion engine and pickers still use; the WebUI grew a full Generate tab (in-browser generation), a richer image-details view (upscales / re-rolls / variations / animation frames, newest-first), animation support including frame-extension and APNG, ImageMagick conversion, plain-text/markdown parameter copying, and the self-healing image index. The dynamic-prompt expander was rebuilt from a 2-pass scheme into the clean up-to-10-levels recursive form. There's even a Jan-21 commit sketching a "custom scripting language for dynamic prompts" — an ambition the project never finished but that explains the plugin-as-function design.
• Mar–Apr 2023 — polish and pause. LoRA support threaded through expansions, presets for many image sizes (wallpapers, ultra-wide, 2:1), "legacy detail wording," and an upscale progress-screen fix — then the repo went dormant.

The full micro-design of the language that came out of this period is documented in ../reference/prompt-dsl.md.

Reading the original directly

A read-only snapshot of the last pre-revival commit is pinned locally (gitignored, not shipped) at assets/references/og-pre-revival-2023-04-07-241a148/ — a clone of the repo checked out at 241a148 ("Added presets to create 2:1 images", 2023-04-07), the final 2023 commit before the 2026 ESM modernization began. Treat it like any other reference: read-only, never a build input. It preserves the original flat CommonJS layout and its own .git, so the original source and its history can be inspected without untangling them from the modernized tree.

2026-06-18 — The 2.0.0 modernization

The project was revived and modernized in one focused effort (see ../sessions/2026-06/2026-06-18.md and the June 2026 changelog):

• CommonJS → ES modules across ~130 files.
• Runtime → Node 24 LTS (.nvmrc, engines).
• Dependencies → current majors, and node-fetch dropped for the built-in fetch.
• Tooling: ESLint 9 flat config + Prettier 3, plus editorconfig/nvmrc and npm scripts.
• A CLAUDE.md + notes/ system and a VERSION single-source-of-truth were added so future work (human or AI) starts oriented.

This was a deliberate semver-major jump (2.0.0): it breaks anyone on an old Node or expecting the CommonJS module shape. The conversion was verified by lint + node --check + an import smoke test; live image generation (which needs a running SD WebUI) was left for a follow-up.