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Documentation Provenance

Spillway uses AI extensively in both software development and documentation. That makes it useful to describe not only what a page says, but also how the page was produced.

Provenance is not a quality score. An AI-generated sentence can be correct or wrong. A human-written sentence can also be correct or wrong. Provenance describes origin and transformation; evidence, review, testing, and citations address correctness.

Why disclose this

Spillway asks its own software to preserve distinctions among source observations, derived interpretations, human decisions, and AI output. Public documentation should follow the same spirit.

Readers should be able to tell whether a page was drafted by AI, substantially written by a person, or developed through repeated human–AI iteration. That is especially important for conceptual essays, architecture explanations, and material that may otherwise sound more definitively human-authored than it is.

Human review and authorship are different questions

A page can be heavily AI-drafted and still be human-directed. Conversely, a human may write most of the words in a document while relying on AI analysis that materially shaped its substance.

Spillway therefore separates at least three questions:

  • Generation: who or what produced the initial prose?
  • Editing: who materially revised or reorganized it?
  • Authority: who reviewed and approved the substantive direction or decision?

A provenance label describes the first two. It does not by itself answer the third, and it never guarantees correctness.

Reusable provenance labels

Public pages may use one of the following labels at the bottom.

AI-generated

The substantive prose was generated primarily by AI with little or no material human rewriting. A person may still have selected, reviewed, or published it.

AI-generated, human-edited

AI produced the main draft and a person materially revised the wording, structure, or substance.

Iterative human–AI construction

The ideas and prose emerged through repeated back-and-forth between a person and AI systems. Neither side is a useful sole author of the final artifact.

This is the most common label for Spillway's evolving product and science documentation.

Human-generated, AI-edited

A person supplied the substantive draft and AI materially reorganized, polished, or expanded it.

Human-generated

The substantive text was written by a person without generative-AI drafting or editing.

What the labels do not mean

The labels do not imply:

  • that AI-generated material is unreviewed;
  • that human-generated material is more accurate;
  • that iterative material has equal human and AI contribution by word count;
  • that a cited source was generated by AI;
  • that a legal or policy document has received professional legal review; or
  • that provenance replaces citations, tests, or source evidence.

Privacy policies and terms of service require stronger version discipline than ordinary explanatory pages.

For those documents, Spillway preserves superseded public versions rather than silently overwriting history. Current pages should show an effective date and a last-updated date, and should link to prior versions when they exist.

A provenance label on a legal document describes drafting history only. It is not a statement that an attorney reviewed or approved the document.

Version history

The project keeps detailed internal version history for public documentation, including source-control history, reviews, and issue discussion.

Because the implementation repository is private, those internal records are not themselves a public transparency surface. Public provenance labels and preserved public document versions are the readable record available to visitors.

For more on the project's development process, see Public Ideas, Private Code.

Documentation provenance: Iterative human–AI construction.