The mismatch is on purpose
An AI will sand the odd choices out of your work, because from inside a document a deliberate inconsistency looks exactly like a mistake.
An AI is a consistency engine. Point it at your creative work and it will find the parts that do not line up and quietly straighten them, because straightening them is what a helpful reader does. The trouble is that a lot of what makes a piece of work feel like yours is exactly the part that does not line up. The odd choice, the loose end you left loose, the effect that contradicts the rule underneath it. From inside the document, a deliberate inconsistency and a mistake look the same.
So my project keeps a file of permanent truths about what the thing is, and a companion file of things not to build. Between them they hold the identity: the look, the voice, the rules about how the world works. Neither one is a to-do list. Their whole job is to survive contact with a helpful assistant.
The effect that contradicts the mechanic
In my game there is an ability whose on-screen effect fires in the direction the character is facing, while the actual rule underneath affects everything around her regardless of where she is pointed. Those two things disagree. That is the design. The directional version reads better on screen, and the surrounding version is the one that plays fair.
Every pass that touched it wanted to reconcile the two. Make the visual a full circle to match the rule, or make the rule directional to match the visual. Both are reasonable. Both are wrong. The entry in the file now says the mismatch is intentional, names which half is allowed to change, and says plainly: do not fix this back.
The question I do not answer
There is something in the story that is never explained. Not withheld until later. Never explained, at all, on purpose.
That one needs a louder note than the rest, because closure is the strongest default a writing assistant has. Ask for a scene near that gap and you will get a scene that fills it, or one that hints hard enough to leave the reader thinking it was filled. The rule in the file is that no writing pass, no design pass, and no art pass may resolve it or plant an explanation, and if a moment seems to demand the answer, the answer is to keep the mystery instead.
What it cost when I got sloppy
Two days ago a cleanup pass retired a small detail I had planted early. At the place where it appeared it looked redundant. It was not redundant, it was setup for something a long way further on, and the note in the file recorded the rule without recording why the rule existed. Without the reason attached, the entry looked like clutter, so it got cleaned up.
I caught it two days later and put it back, with the intent written next to it this time. That is the actual lesson. A rule with no reason attached gets optimized away by the next reader, and around here the next reader is a machine that is very good at tidying.
Claude named the principle while we were writing this note: Chesterton’s fence, the old rule that you do not tear down a fence until you know why someone built it. The same idea lives in style bibles and art direction docs, where the point of writing the aesthetic down is to stop the next hand from improving it into something generic. I was not thinking in any of those terms. I was just tired of finding my own choices smoothed over.
How I write the entries now
Three parts, in this order. What the rule is. Why it exists, in one line, in plain language. What a violation would look like, phrased as the tempting fix somebody would reach for. That third part matters more than it sounds, because the failure never arrives labeled as a violation. It arrives labeled as an improvement.
The honest limit
This only guards the choices I noticed. There is no protection here for the distinctive thing I have not yet realized is distinctive, and I will not find out it was worth guarding until after it has been sanded off.
It also cuts the other way. A file like this can calcify. Some of the smoothing suggestions are right, and a firm rule makes it easier to stop hearing them. My compromise is that every entry is mine to override, and several of them have been overridden, with the date and the reversal written into the entry instead of quietly replacing what was there. The file is a record of what I decided, not a fence around what I am allowed to think.