Your writing profile is the most important configuration in Riterly. It controls how your drafts sound, what the AI emphasizes, and how closely the output matches your voice. When it's working well, the results feel natural. When something shifts — whether from your own edits or from a change in how the underlying AI model interprets your setup — the degradation can be subtle enough that you don't notice it until several drafts later.
Version history exists to protect you from that situation.
What version history is
Every time your personal writing profile is saved, Riterly captures a complete snapshot of it. Not a diff, not a change log — a full copy of the profile state at that moment. These snapshots are stored automatically and made available through a collapsible panel called Version history, accessible in two places: the writing profile editor (Account → Writing Profile) and the profile sandbox.
The feature applies to the personal profile layer only. The global baseline and niche template are not versioned — more on that distinction below.
The panel itself sits below the editor or sandbox layout. To open it, click the Version history header.
What triggers a new version
Four actions create a new version entry:
- Saving through the advanced markdown editor — any save from the editor creates a snapshot
- Completing the writing profile wizard — finishing the wizard creates your first snapshot, labeled as version 1
- Saving a profile edit from within the sandbox — edits made and saved while inside the sandbox are captured just like editor saves
- Restoring a past version — the restore action itself creates a new entry (explained in detail below)
There is no draft profile state. Every committed change is captured immediately. If you save, it's versioned.
How the panel works
The panel displays up to 25 versions in reverse chronological order, with the most recent at the top. All versions are preserved in the database regardless of what the panel shows — the 25-entry limit is a display limit, not a storage limit.
Each entry shows:
- Date and time the version was saved
- A label — either
Saved,Restored from [version], orCurrent - Whether it is the current version — the active version is marked Current and has no Restore button; every other entry shows a Restore button
Custom labels are not available in the current build. Versions are identified by their timestamp and how they were created.
How restoring a version works
The restore process is four steps:
- Open the Version history panel
- Find the version you want to return to
- Click Restore
- Confirm the restore
When you restore a version, Riterly does not overwrite your history. Instead, it creates a new version entry timestamped at the moment of restore, labeled with a reference to the source — for example, Restored from [original timestamp]. Your history before that point remains intact.
This means a restore is itself reversible. If you restore version 5 and the results are still wrong, you can restore any other version — including the one you just restored from, or one that existed before version 5. Nothing is lost by restoring.
This design matters when you're troubleshooting profile drift. You can move backward through your history, test each state, and return to a different point without compounding the problem.
What version history does and does not track
Version history tracks the personal profile layer only.
The global baseline — the foundational writing rules that apply across all profiles — and the niche template are not under version control. Changes to those layers are not captured in the version history panel and cannot be rolled back through it.
This means version history is specifically useful when the problem is in your profile configuration. If a change in the global baseline or niche template is affecting your drafts, version history will not help you isolate it — that's a different kind of investigation.
Within the personal profile layer, every save is captured. The practical use cases this covers:
- Your own edits made drafts worse. You updated your profile, ran a few drafts, and the output has shifted in a direction you don't want. Version history lets you return to any earlier state of the profile and pick up from there.
- An AI model update changed how your profile is interpreted. The profile hasn't changed, but the drafts have. You can use version history alongside the sandbox to test earlier profile states against the same topic and identify where the drift started.
The sandbox integration is particularly useful for the second case. Because the Version history panel appears inside the sandbox, you can restore a profile version and immediately run a draft against it — without navigating away. That makes direct comparison between profile states practical rather than theoretical.
To understand how to use version history alongside sandbox drafts for direct profile comparison, see the sandbox documentation.