Write

One

Open the register

You open it by saying so, in the chat. There is no command to run and no button: you are talking to the assistant you were going to write with anyway, and it answers.

you   open the register, I am about to write an article

it    I'm keeping a record of how this gets written from here.
      It only sees this conversation, and nothing in it is
      ever deleted. If there's anyone who must not appear in
      the record — not just in the article, in the record —
      tell me now and I'll keep them out.
      So: what are you writing, and where will it go?

you   a piece on X for Y, about 1,500 words — I'll draft it
      myself and use you for research and the edit

That exchange is the first thing recorded: the register starts before you have written a word. It comes with two limits. The record sees this conversation and nothing else — what you write elsewhere it will not know about — and from here everything you write is recorded, which may change how you write.

Two

Write and talk with AI as you usually do

From then on you write, and the work is recorded as it happens — research, outline, drafting, revision, titling, every change and who made it.

There is nothing to remember and nothing to fill in. What is asked of you is what a machine cannot decide: who must be kept out of the record, if anyone must — said at the opening, or the moment you first name them — and, at the end, a last read of what the record says about other people before it is sealed.

Three

Close the case

When the text is done you say so, and the closing runs: the work is attributed span by span, measured, sealed with a signature and two independent timestamps. You are told three things and asked one.

you   the piece is done

it    Of the words in the final text, 47% are the model's
      and 53% yours; of the ideas, 31% the model's and 69%
      yours. Almost all of the model's words are in the
      revision — the first draft is 86% yours.

      Two things this does not prove: it can't show the
      record is complete, only that nothing in it was
      changed after the fact, and the ideas figure is a
      judgement, not a count.

it    One thing before I seal it. The record still holds
      what you told me about other people, and passages the
      article no longer has — this is the last point at
      which any of that can come out for free. Do you want
      to read it? It's about forty lines.

you   yes

Colophon provides, together with the content you have worked on, the register in a compressed format, a result — the four-quadrant image and a summary of its evaluation — and a tool to verify the data. Then it generates a PDF document with the text, appends the result to its last page, and attaches both the register and the verifier to the PDF itself.

Four

Hand it over — and sign it, if you want your name on it

The text, the complete PDF and the result are yours to use however you like. Publish one, all three, or none — the method has no opinion about it.

One decision is left, and it is optional. A qualified electronic signature over that document covers the article and the evidence in one act, and because a supervised trust service identified you first, the reader gets a person rather than a key. It is the only place identity enters this method at all.

Embed, then sign, in that order. A document signed the other way round shows a perfectly valid signature over pages that hold none of the evidence — the failure that looks most like success. The tools refuse the dangerous half of it: a document that claims to carry the record but does not is not produced at all.

A case without a signature is a complete case. It simply makes no claim about who wrote the text, which is the honest position when nothing has been published to back one.