Drafts

Every document in Alchex has exactly one live draft — the working copy everyone edits between published versions. There is no per-person copy and no check-out: when two people open the same document, they are in the same draft. Read this before you edit anything you would be unhappy to lose.

One draft, one state

The draft is either open or sealed. What you see in Governance → a document → Document depends on that state and on your role on the document's team.

Editing needs the Writer or Owner role on the document's team. A workspace Owner or Admin counts as team Owner everywhere. A Reader who tries to propose a change is told their role is Reader and that proposing needs Writer or Owner.

While the draft is sealed, nothing can change its content — not you, not a teammate, not the AI. An edit attempt against a sealed draft is refused with a message saying the draft is sealed for review. To keep editing, the review has to come back: the submitter or an Owner can withdraw it, or an approver can reject it. Both return the draft to open with its content intact.

The draft and the published version

The draft is not what readers see. Readers see the last published version until a new one is published, and the document header says so — "Draft · readers see" the current version, and that this draft publishes as the next version when approved. A document that has never been published is invisible to readers until its first version publishes.

See Submit and approve for the review path and Publishing for what happens at publish time.

Draft sessions and unsaved work

Each draft runs as a numbered session. Your editor connects to that session, and your typing is applied to the shared draft as you go — there is no Save button.

Your browser also keeps a local buffer of the session. Edits typed while your connection is down survive a dropped connection and even a closed tab, and sync when you reconnect. This matters at exactly one moment: when the document publishes while your edits are still stuck in that local buffer.

When that happens, the draft rolls to a new session, seeded from the freshly published version — and the old session's local edits cannot be merged into it. Alchex never merges them silently. Instead you get a banner: You have unsynced changes from an earlier draft, with three actions.

Discard is irreversible. The buffer is only in your browser, so nobody else can recover it for you. Copy first if there is any chance the content is still wanted. If the stranded content turns out to be identical to what already published, Alchex clears it for you rather than showing the banner.

How a draft is superseded

A draft's content is replaced, not deleted, and only in these ways.

• Approval. An approver approves the sealed draft; the exact reviewed content publishes as the new version, and the draft rolls to a fresh session seeded from it.
• Direct publish by an Owner. An Owner can publish the open draft without a review round. This is refused while someone else's review is pending — a direct publish can never step over another person's submission. If the Owner's own submission is pending, it is superseded by their direct publish. The action is recorded as a direct publish in the document's activity.
• Restoring an old version. Restoring from version history replaces the draft's current content with that version's, and everyone editing sees the replacement immediately. Published versions are untouched, and publishing still goes through review.

Every one of these is recorded in Governance → a document → Activity. See Versions and Activity and archive.