A proposed change to an existing document, dataset, or codebase is shown as a change — what was, what would be — so the actor can judge and accept it in parts rather than take or leave the whole.
Forms
Recurring forms: side-by-side and inline diffs, per-change accept/reject, track-changes marking in prose, and review queues where accumulated proposals wait for a pass.
Consequences
- the delta is a reviewable object — what was, what would be, side by side or in place — so judgement lands on the change rather than on re-reading the whole, and an approval has something concrete to act on
- the diff's granularity becomes the decision's granularity: whatever the review can show separately is what can be accepted or rejected separately
- reviewing deltas narrows attention to what changed, so consequences in the unchanged surroundings are exactly what the review doesn't show
Resources & references
- AI UX Playground — Smart Diff
- Long pre-AI lineage: version-control code review and word-processor track changes are this pattern without the machine author.
Appears in
Working on the same thing
- Working apart and returning, step 2 — Review the returning changes
Delegating work
- Receiving the result, step 2 — Show the result as a set of changes
Related patterns
Precedes
- Approval gate — the delta is a reviewable object — what was, what would be, side by side or in place — so judgement lands on the change rather than on re-reading the whole, and an approval has something concrete to act on
Enacts
- Agency — the actor disposes over each change instead of inheriting the batch
Complements
- Undo — rejecting a proposed change is recovery moved before the commit
- Draft and publish — the proposal holds in a draft state while the review decides what publishes
- Commenting — review talk anchors to the delta rather than to the document at large
Related to
- Plan preview — the plan is the intention before the work; the change review is the delta after it
- Steering surface — what the instruction surface can show of a change it caused, when the change landed on content it does not display
Preceded by
- Generated content — the proposed change is generated output aimed at existing content
- Dry run — the run produces a before-and-after over cases, which the actor may want to accept or reject one at a time rather than as a whole