Change Inbox and File History

Letting an AI edit your manuscript only works if you can see what it changed and take it back.

The Changes button in the top bar is that entry point.

What It Records

Every file write goes into the ledger, whoever did it:

• your saves in the editor
• the Agent's write / edit / apply_patch
• external tools writing to disk directly (reconciled after the fact by the file watcher)

The ledger is an append-only event stream over content-addressed snapshots — records are never rewritten, and identical content is never stored twice.

The Inbox

A change card sits above the Agent input box, collapsed by default; expand it to see which files this round touched. For a deeper review, open the full history dialog.

For each change you can:

• Accept: acknowledge the change and clear it from your queue
• Revert: restore the file to its state before the change

The accepted position is recorded per user and per path, while the session cursor is recorded per session — so when several people or several sessions work at once, each one's "what have I already seen" stays independent.

Reverting and restoring are first-class events in their own right, so they reappear in the notification channel.

What the Agent Sees

Every turn the Agent receives a file change notice: a Git-style English summary telling it which files changed since the last turn, and who changed them.

How detailed that notice is depends on the profile: leader gets the full version, writer gets a condensed one, Inline AI gets none. A single-file diff has a length cap (512 lines by default); past that it reports the fact without pasting the content.

Two kinds of paths are reported as fact only, with no content: sensitive paths and deleted paths. They are never promised in the inbox, and their text is not read out on the server either.

Where the Data Lives

One separate history database per project:

<project>/.nbook/history.sqlite

Retention is tiered and sparse — recent history is kept in full, older history keeps the last version of each day. The parameters are configurable.

Read this before you share

history.sqlite holds full-text snapshots, including content you have already deleted. A project download bundle contains a snapshot of it, and the frontend warns you about this.

To send your work to someone, send the Markdown files under manuscript/. It never enters the shareable log bundle — that one is allowlisted and contains only logs. See Privacy Boundaries.

Not Built Yet

The single-file timeline view and the full interface for recovering deletions are not finished; the inbox is the main entry point today. The underlying event stream already supports both views.

Keep Reading

• The Three Agent Modes: how read-only mode blocks writes at the source.
• Running, Data and Privacy