Reviewing the AI's structural changes in place

In one line: how to read the structural changes the AI proposes — where they appear, where Accept and Skip are, and what "Outdated" means.

What you are looking at is a proposal, not your file

Until you press Accept, not one byte of the file has changed. What is drawn on screen is what is on disk, with the proposal laid over it. Read the file at this point — or ask the AI to read it again — and you get the old version.

The proposal appears where it belongs, rather than in a list off to one side. Additions show up in the spot they will land in. Anything being changed or removed is marked on the card, the line or the node it already occupies.

Four marks, one row of controls

Mark	Colour	Meaning
Added	green	This does not exist yet; Accept brings it in
Changed	amber	This is already in the file; its contents are being replaced
Removed	red	Accept takes it out
Moved	grey	New position, or a new act. Grey on purpose — drawing it red makes people think something was deleted

Every marked spot carries the same row: a coloured chip with one of those four words, then Accept and Skip. The rest of the interface stays greyscale; colour is only used on the chip.

The beat board has one extra wrinkle: when a beat moves to a different act the chip reads Moved to "Act Two (Confrontation)". Move it inside the same act and it just reads Moved.

What each of the four looks like

.script screenplays. Changes sit in the screenplay itself, fenced off by a coloured stripe down the leading edge. Added lines are on green, changed on amber, removed on red; the old line is struck through and faded, with the new one underneath it. A whole added scene appears as one green block whose header reads New scene. A scene-heading change gets a chip that spells the result out: Heading → INT The You'an Scriptorium · NIGHT. The lines are drawn by the real screenplay components, so what you see is what you get after accepting.

.beats beat boards. A new beat is a dashed green card dropped at the exact place it will be inserted — which act, and between which two cards. Existing cards keep their normal look and gain a ring instead (red = will be removed, amber = will change, grey = will move, green = new), because a card's own border already means "has files pinned / not written yet". So a beat about to be removed is not struck through: it still shows its content, plus a red ring and a Removed chip. Accept and Skip sit along the bottom of that card. Act-level changes — renaming an act, deleting one — are marked above the act header. If the AI opens a new act you get a whole extra dashed green column, with the beats it wants to put there sitting inside it.

.map relationship maps. The proposal is drawn straight onto the canvas. A new node is a dashed green rounded box with a translucent green fill, at the coordinates it will land on; a new edge is a dashed green line. An existing node about to change or go gets a dashed outline around it (amber = change, red = removal). An edge about to change gets a thick dashed overlay along it, and if its label is changing, the new label is written just above the midpoint. A move is drawn as a grey dashed trail from the old position to the new one, with a hollow dashed circle left behind where it used to be. Accept and Skip live in a small white card floating next to that node or line.

.timeline timelines. A new entry is a dashed green card, and it sorts into its correct chronological place rather than trailing after some other card. An entry about to change turns amber at the border; one about to be removed turns red and visibly fades. Accept and Skip are on the card's second row.

The floating pill: how many are waiting in this file

All four types float a small pill at the top-right: a count, and an Accept all in this file button. With nothing pending it does not exist at all.

That count is the number of AI calls, not the number of marks on screen. So one batch — the AI doing several things in one go — counts as one, even if it left five marks. Press Accept on any of those five and the whole batch goes in.

What "Outdated" means

Accepting does not paste in a result computed earlier. It takes the original operation and re-runs it against the file as it is now. That is what stops it from clobbering edits you made in the meantime.

The cost is that if the thing the operation was going to touch is no longer there, it cannot run. That spot then shows as Outdated — the Accept button is not drawn at all, only Skip, with a line of grey text beside it: No longer applies — the target is gone from the file.

Three common causes:

Why a change goes outdated

You deleted or edited that item yourself You skipped an earlier change this one depended on Another change you accepted took the target away

None of these is a fault. Skip it, then ask the AI to redo it against the file as it stands.

Some outdated changes cannot even be marked, because the thing they were going to edit no longer exists and there is nowhere to draw. Those collect in small cards under the floating pill, chipped Outdated, again with Skip only.

How two changes to the same thing are merged

When the AI touches the same item twice in one turn, you see one spot, not two:

• Added, then removed → nets to nothing; no trace on screen. You do not need to watch the AI add something and take it back.
• Changed twice → one spot. The "before" is the state before the first change; the "after" is the last result.
• Added, then changed → still Added, with the final content.
• Changed, then removed → Removed, and what is struck through for you is what you originally wrote, not the intermediate version.

The world map is the exception: a banner, not in place

.geomap works differently. Its proposals are not drawn on the map. Instead a strip appears at the top of the editor: AI has N pending changes, with Accept all in this file and Review on the right.

Review expands a panel that handles only the frontmost change, advancing to the next as you deal with each one — there is no way to jump around. Top to bottom the panel gives you: which one of how many, Skip and Accept, an amber warning if this change deletes items or clears fields (naming which), a written description of what changed (a place added, a river removed), and finally the old and new maps as thumbnails side by side, zoomable, with an option to lock the two viewports together.

The reason it needs a written description is plain enough: two terrain thumbnails will not show you that a place was renamed.

The number in the file tree

A grey rounded number appears at the end of a row in the file explorer: that is how many changes are pending in that file. A collapsed folder shows the total underneath it; expand it and the files carry their own. Hover for N pending AI changes.

When several files have changes waiting, the "N changes to review" list will take you straight to one of them — each row is the file name, its folder path underneath, and its own count.

Notes

• This is not the same thing as prose review. A .md manuscript goes through Change Review — a side-by-side window (Original / AI Suggestion) where you take or leave one passage at a time. Structured files go through the in-place review this page describes. Different buttons, different screen, different words: the prose route is here.
• You can review on a phone. Screenplay files became editable on mobile in September 2026 — tap a line or a scene heading to edit it in place — and Accept and Skip work there the same way. Timelines are editable on a phone too. The world map is the one that stays read-only on a small screen.
• The timeline's calendar view has no cards to mark. Switch to the calendar and you will see no marks at all; in that mode the floating pill is the only way through. The same goes for a change to the calendar setup rather than to entries — there is nothing to mark, so the pill is where you accept it.
• Relationship-map group changes too. When the AI adds a group or renames one, the count goes up but nothing appears on the canvas. Accept from the pill, or handle it in the chat.
• Proposals outside the visible canvas are not drawn. Marks too far outside the current view are skipped; pan over to them, or just use "Accept all in this file".

Related

• Docs: AI structural editing: why it edits by field
• Docs: When the AI can edit structure, and when it can't
• Docs: Change Review: review AI edits (prose)
• Docs: What a beat board is, and when to use one
• Docs: What the timeline (.timeline) is for
• Docs: What a world map file is (.geomap)
• Docs: Why versions exist and how your data is kept safe