thesis-control

/thesis-control - Thesis Drift Control

Purpose

Prevent AI-assisted writing from becoming fluent but distorted. Use this before and after substantive thesis or manuscript edits when the risk is not spelling or style, but loss of author control: project-level reframing, deletion of the real-world task or intended use, a primary domain becoming a secondary example, a changed research object or question, auxiliary analyses becoming primary, widened claims, blurred section purpose, missing caveats, unsynchronised adjacent paragraphs, or local edits that weaken the paper spine.

Trigger Words

This skill activates on: thesis control, drift audit, edit contract, spine card, claim drift, author control, loss of control, scope creep, rewrite risk, /thesis-control.

Core Rule

Do not edit thesis prose until the project intent, current manuscript contract, global thesis audit, section spine, and intended local change form one explicit and traceable contract chain.

The contract must answer:

This edit is allowed to change [specific local issue] in [specific unit], while preserving [spine sentence], [scope boundary], [core claims], and [do-not-change items].

If this sentence cannot be written, stop and diagnose the section instead of rewriting it.

The control hierarchy is:

Author-approved Project Intent
→ Author-approved Manuscript Contract
→ Passed Global Thesis Audit
→ Section Spine Card
→ Edit Contract
→ Post-edit Drift Audit

A lower layer cannot amend a higher one. If the title, abstract, primary domain, research object, research question, contribution scope, or manuscript structure no longer matches the approved intent, stop. Revise or roll back the manuscript, or create a new explicitly approved intent version that preserves the earlier row as history.

Control Files

Choose one control profile and name it as canonical.

For a lightweight single-manuscript workflow, read references/author_control_lightweight.md and use: