# PatchWrite: One Line, Not One Section -- Compile-Gated, Validity-Preserving Editing for AI-Drafted Manuscripts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23001 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23001/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04227/) (2025)
- [The AI Scientist-v2: Workshop-Level Automated Scientific Discovery via Agentic Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08066/) (2025)
- [Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14207/) (2024)
- [AutoSurvey: Large Language Models Can Automatically Write Surveys](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10252/) (2024)
- [PaperOrchestra: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated AI Research Paper Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05018/) (2026)
- [PaperJury: Due-Process Review for Bounded LaTeX Revision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16322/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated manuscript pipelines often regenerate an entire section to repair a local defect, allowing unrelated metrics and citations to change even when the resulting PDF still builds. PatchWrite instead constrains how candidate edits become committed manuscript states: it reuses bounded EDIT N M editing and rollback, but tightens compilation acceptance with fatal-log checks and adds evidence locks that require every cited key and experimental numeric token to be attested by a reference registry or experimental log. Candidates that fail either check are rejected and the previous HEAD is retained. On a 24-manuscript x 8-fault oracle stress test (768 jobs, evenly split between compile-breaking and content-only faults), whole-slot rewriting mutated an unrelated "12-layer" line in every case (0/192 preserved; numeric Jaccard 0.6667), whereas PatchWrite preserved it in 192/192 cases. Removing the compile gate reduced acceptance to 0, while removing the evidence gate allowed a hallucinated citation to pass. The same pattern held across all eight faults. To test the protocol with generation rather than oracle edits, we reran the 192 jobs with the writer model proposing the edits. The model's candidates were accepted in 75% of cases; nearly all rejections came from one reproducible failure mode in which the model attempted to delete a line using an empty replacement unsupported by the current grammar. Every accepted candidate passed both gates, and 93.75% fixed the injected fault; the remaining cases involved a technically valid but sentence-inappropriate citation and one markup-changing near-miss. In a blind evaluation of sixteen PDF pairs, both raters preferred PatchWrite for preserving lab-grounded facts (C1 Likert 5.0 vs. 2.0), while rating prose quality nearly identically. Logs from 193 in-product drafting tasks show the same classes of failures occurring in practice.