Character consistency isn't a seed trick: a 2-stage image pipeline that actually locks the face

If you're building an app that generates the same character across many scenes, you've probably hit the wall already: seeds drift, LoRA training is heavy and slow, and "same character, new pose" prompting quietly changes the face. The approach that actually holds up in production is a 2-stage pipeline — generate one canonical base image , then edit from that base as the reference for every new scene. Consistency comes from the reference, not the seed. Below: why the common approaches drift, how the 2-stage pipeline works, the async job queue that makes it deployable, and the serverless-GPU setup that keeps it affordable. There's a free, runnable slice of the whole transport layer at the end. Why the obvious approaches drift Seeds. A seed pins the noise , not the identity . Re-use a seed with the same prompt and you get the same image — but that's reproduction, not consistency. The moment you change the prompt ("now she's in a café"), the denoising path changes and the face re-rolls with it. Seeds give you determinism for identical inputs; they give you nothing for new scenes . Prompt-only ("the same woman as before"). The model has no memory. Every generation is a fresh sample from the distribution your words describe. "Same face as last time" isn't in the prompt vocabulary — there is no last time. LoRA per character. This one actually works — that's why everyone suggests it — but look at what it costs in an app context: curate 15–40 images per character, run a training job per character, store and load adapter weights per character, and repeat all of it whenever a user creates someone new. For a personal project, fine. For an app where users create characters on demand, you just signed up to run a training farm. The 2-stage pipeline The fix is embarrassingly direct once you see it: Stage 1 — CAST Stage 2 — RE-SCENE (repeat forever) text-to-image image-edit model "describe character" → base image + "put them in a café" → scene 1 = base image base image + "walking in