Hybrid Authorship

The temptation, once an LLM can write competently, is to let it write everything. Or, once a human can write competently with an LLM, to claim full authorship of everything. Both extremes produce bad knowledge systems.

The right model is hybrid: some content is human-authored, some is LLM-compiled, and the split is deliberately marked.

The principle

Every artifact in the KMS has an authorship class:

• Human-authored: written by the user, possibly with LLM assistance, but the user is responsible for every assertion. Examples: principles, frontiers, decisions, opinions.
• LLM-compiled: produced by the system from raw material. The user reviewed and accepted; the LLM did the writing. Examples: entity summaries, meeting digests, weekly check-ins.
• LLM-derived: produced by the system from raw material, not reviewed. Surfaced on demand only. Examples: ad-hoc query responses, draft surfacings.

The class is a property of the artifact and is shown on the page. The user always knows what they are reading.

Why it matters

Trust in a KMS depends on knowing which claims are anchored in human judgment and which are anchored in pattern-matching over your own notes. Conflate the two and the system loses credibility the first time an LLM-derived summary asserts something the user never said.

Mark the split and the user can read confidently, knowing where to challenge, where to trust, and where to expect the LLM to be doing roughly the right thing.

How it works

Three mechanisms:

1. Frontmatter declares authorship. Every page has authorship: human | compiled | derived. Renderers display a small badge; agents respect the class when proposing edits.
2. Compiled content is regeneratable. If a meeting digest is wrong, the user fixes the source and regenerates. They don't hand-edit the digest. This keeps the compilation chain intact.
3. Human content is sacred. Agents propose edits to human-authored content but never apply them automatically. The bar for changing a principle is high; the bar for regenerating a digest is zero.

Where the line sits

The principle is clean. The line, where exactly human-authored ends and LLM-compiled begins, is not. It moves with tier, with topic, with the cost of being wrong, and with my current trust in the model.

The default by tier

Tier	Default authorship	Exceptions
Personal	LLM-compiled	Decisions, opinions, principles → human
Team	Human-promoted	Routine summaries → LLM, marked clearly
App-scoped	LLM-derived but UI-marked	User-edited overrides → human, source preserved

The pattern: the more an artifact gets cited by other people, the further it sits from the LLM-compiled end.

What pushes the line toward human

• Multiple readers will cite it without re-reading sources.
• The cost of a wrong claim is high (legal, financial, customer-trust).
• The content is opinion or judgment, not synthesis.
• The compilation has been wrong in this domain before.

What pushes the line toward LLM

• The artifact is regeneratable: you can re-run with corrected sources.
• The reader is the original author or someone with full source access.
• The cost of being roughly right is high; the cost of being wrong is low.
• The volume is too high for human authorship to keep up.

The tricky middle: promoted compilations

The interesting case is content that starts as LLM-compiled and gets promoted to human-authored after review. Today the marking gets fuzzy in three ways:

• The artifact looks the same after promotion.
• The provenance trail (which model, which version, which sources) often gets lost.
• A reader six months later can't tell if a claim was reviewed or was rolled forward unreviewed.

My current best guess: every promoted compilation should carry a promoted-from-compiled-on: <date> by: <reviewer> field, and the original compiled version should be preserved. Not done consistently anywhere yet.

Where I've been wrong

Two failure modes I've actually hit:

1. A personal-KMS check-in note overwrote a hand-written reflection because the compilation rule didn't distinguish. Lost the original. Fixed by adding authorship: human frontmatter and a hook that blocks overwrites.
2. A team-KMS digest got cited in a client doc as if it were human-authored. The digest was roughly right but had one wrong claim. Caught before sending. The fix was a "this is auto-compiled" badge on the digest and a rule that compiled artifacts can't be copied into client docs without re-review.

Both failures were about the line being unclear, not about the principle being wrong. The principle held; the enforcement didn't.

In Claude primitives

• CLAUDE.md declares the authorship classes and the rules per class: "never edit authorship: human files without explicit user approval."
• Skills are split by class. compile-digest writes compiled content; propose-edit-to-principle writes a suggestion, not a change.
• Hooks (PreToolUse on Edit) enforce the rule at the harness level: block edits to human-authored files unless the conversation explicitly authorized it.

Where I've seen it

This is the youngest of the eight principles. It crystallized after several cases where a personal KMS's compilation chain quietly overwrote something I had hand-written and I lost the original, and after watching an app-scoped KMS struggle to communicate to users which summaries were "real" vs "drafted."

The line where hybrid authorship sits varies sharply across the three tiers: personal can let the LLM compile most things; team has to be much more conservative because compiled content gets cited by other people; app-scoped has to be the most restrictive because a wrong compilation becomes a product bug.

The contrarian read

Marking authorship is overhead, and most users will not look at the badge. Both true. The badge isn't for them. It's for you, the operator, six months later, trying to figure out which assertions in your own KMS came from you and which came from a model.