Writing
Cheat mode
The one place the coach writes the post for you, what it costs, and what it marks.
thestory.run is built on one rule: the coach never writes your post. Cheat mode is the single, deliberate exception to it, and everything about how it works exists to keep it an exception.
What it does
You activate it from the writing screen, on a piece you have already started. The coach writes the whole post, once, from what you brought it: your rough thought, the conversation you had about it, the lines you marked as worth keeping, the arc you agreed on, and your intention profile. It also reads a few of your own published posts, to hear how you write.
Those earlier posts are a voice sample and nothing else. The coach matches your sentence length, your vocabulary and how you open and land a post. It takes no facts, numbers or subjects from them, because a claim from an old post is not a claim this post can support.
What it costs
An allowance, not money, and the allowance scales with how often you set out to post. One cheat for every four posts in your plan, never fewer than one a month and never more than three. Someone posting once a week gets one; nobody gets a cheat a week.
The reasoning is a diet cheat day. If the coach writes one post in four, it is an escape hatch for the week the words will not come. If it writes every second one, it is just how you post, and the product stops doing what you came for.
A cheat that fails costs nothing. If the coach cannot be reached, your allowance is untouched.
What it marks
The piece is permanently marked as coach-written. The mark does not expire, it travels with the post in your library, and it is visible to you and to anyone in your organisation who can already see your work.
It also does not count toward your progress. A cheated post does not extend a streak, and it is not counted as one of your posts for the week. The numbers stay honest: they say how much you wrote, not how much got published.
Undoing it
Right after a cheat, the post you had before it is still there and you can put it back. Once you leave, the coach’s version is the version.
Why it exists at all
Because the alternative is worse. People who cannot face a blank page on a bad week go and paste the whole thing into a general-purpose chatbot, which knows nothing about them, keeps no record, and hands back something that sounds like everybody. A cheat here is bounded, it is grounded in what you actually said, and it is on the record. You will know which posts were yours.