Field Note / Sep 3, 2026Back to Field Notes →
Revision beats regeneration when the first 80% is already right.
A practical creative workflow improves sharply when the tool can preserve a strong composition and change one specific thing instead of reinventing the entire result. Regeneration is useful when the concept itself is wrong. Once the concept is right, repeated full regeneration often creates drift: a product changes, a face changes, spacing moves, or a useful detail disappears. Good revision tools reduce that waste by treating the existing result as an asset worth protecting.
Practical suggestions
- Before regenerating, name exactly what is wrong and what must not change.
- Change one variable at a time so you can judge whether the revision actually improved the work.
- Save the strongest intermediate version before every major edit so you can return to it if the next pass drifts.