Cheat mode

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 stays out of what you earn. It does not extend the streak on Progress & Wins, it fills no badge, and that page says out loud how many of the posts behind its numbers the coach wrote. It does still count in the places that only record what went out: your week on Homebase, the activity grid, your topics. The line is between what you earned and what happened, and both are worth knowing.

Whose words are whose

While you are on the sheet, the authorship bar counts as the coach’s only the words the cheat actually introduced, measured against what stood on the page before you spent it. Anything you had already written is yours from the first render, and every line of the coach’s that you rewrite moves back to your side as you type.

The bar is a live reading of the page in front of you. The mark above is not: that one is the record of how the piece came to exist, and it does not move.

Undoing it

The words you had before the cheat are kept, so Undo is not a moment you can miss. Leave the piece, come back next week, and it is still offered. What closes it is you: change the coach’s version and there is nothing left to put back. A piece you have already posted cannot be undone at all.

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.