A proposed change to existing material 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.
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.
To-do
The attention-narrowing force (unchanged context escapes review) has code-review literature behind it worth importing. Whether per-hunk acceptance granularity deserves its own force treatment is open.
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
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
- Plan preview — the plan is the intention before the work; the change review is the delta after it
Preceded by
- Generated content — the proposed change is generated output aimed at existing material