Pencil, ink, inked

Three states, and they are the reason iterating here is safe.

• Pencil — drafted by a model. Anything may overwrite it.
• Ink — you edited it. It is marked as hand-written and shows as such.
• Inked — you locked it. No generation, revision or dirty-propagation pass will change it. Only you can unlock it.

Why this is enforced in the engine, not by convention

The obvious way to build this is a convention: generation code politely checks a flag. That lasts until the second code path forgets.

So it is enforced instead: a code path that writes over a locked, user-authored field fails its own tests. There is no polite version of the rule, and there is no admin override — not because an override would be hard, but because a tool that can quietly overwrite your writing is a tool you have to re-read after every run, and at that point it has stopped saving you anything.

What you see

Edited fields are marked hand-written. Locked fields carry an INK seal and cannot be typed into until you unlock them — a locked field that silently accepted keystrokes and then reverted would be worse than no lock at all.

When a regeneration meets a lock

It leaves it alone and tells you.

The change review after a run shows what changed this session, and counts separately how many of your locked fields the run crossed — that is, wanted to change and could not. That count is the useful signal: a high number usually means the thing you locked and the thing being regenerated disagree, and the model is going to keep pushing against it every run until you resolve which one is right.

What to lock, and when

Lock early, and lock the things you would be annoyed to lose:

• A character’s voice, once it sounds right. Voice drift across regenerations is the single most common way a cast stops feeling like the same people.
• Names and terms you have already used elsewhere — in art, in code, in a pitch.
• A beat whose emotional shape you are sure of, so restructuring around it does not quietly flatten it.

What not to lock: anything you are still unsure about. A lock on an undecided field turns every subsequent run into an argument.

Unlocking

Unlock, edit, lock again. Unlocking is deliberate and one click, and the field stays marked hand-written afterwards — the history of who wrote what does not evaporate because the lock came off for a moment.

It survives export

Origin and lock state are part of the artifact, not the interface. They are in the files, in the git history, and in the exported repository. If you come back in six months, the record of what you wrote and what a model drafted is still there.