Get the best results from your sources

Voice comes from your writing (website, uploads, Hacker News posts). Topics work best when prose sets your lane and an optional repo grounds ideas in what you actually built. Drafts combine your brand profile with chunks retrieved from whatever sources you attached.

A codebase alone can suggest product angles, but it cannot learn how you sound on the page.

• At least one prose source: a website you write on, or a file upload (essay, newsletter, brand doc).
• Wait until the source status is ready (ingestion finished).
• Open Brand and click Regenerate from sources.

A single thin landing page works, but the voice will be thin too. Prefer sources with real paragraphs you have published.

These count as prose — Kiln uses them for brand voice, audience, and verbatim examples:

• Website — blog, marketing site, docs you wrote in full sentences.
• File upload — PDF, DOCX, or markdown exports of posts and newsletters.
• Hacker News — your submissions and comments (public username).

If you only connect a GitHub repo, Kiln indexes code for topics and retrieval, but brand voice stays generic until you add one of the above or fill in the Brand form by hand.

Repo README and markdown docs in the repo do count as prose at the chunk level, but connecting a website or upload is clearer and usually richer.

Many users run Kiln with no codebase — only a website and uploaded writing. That is often the best setup for voice.

Add a repo when you want topics and drafts anchored in real features. The repo should complement your writing, not replace it.

If every ready source is a repository, Kiln will still suggest topics from your code and draft using retrieved chunks — but regenerated brand voice will be hedged and empty on examples. You will see a warning on the Sources page when this happens.

Fix: add a website or upload something you have actually written.

When you create a builder, you can limit which sources it draws from. An empty source set means all sources in the workspace. For a blog-only builder, select only website and file sources so drafts are not pulled toward unrelated code comments.