The Story Atlas, kept current in the background.
Only what changed
Quarkle keeps a fingerprint of each chapter’s content. A background process wakes up periodically and compares fingerprints. If a chapter hasn’t changed, it’s skipped entirely. No model is called, nothing happens. Only the chapters you’ve actually edited get looked at, and only a handful are processed at a time so the work stays light.Briefed on the diff, not the book
When a chapter has changed, Quarkle doesn’t re-read the whole thing from scratch. For a small edit, the maintenance agent is briefed on what changed, the diff, and asked to update just the affected notes: this chapter’s summary, and any character, world, or plot notes it touches. The first time it builds notes for a brand-new chapter, it reads the full text. This is why a two-sentence tweak doesn’t trigger a full rebuild of your Atlas.A cheap, fast worker
Because this runs constantly in the background, it uses a fast, inexpensive model suited to reading a diff and tidying notes, not a frontier model. It runs at a low priority so it never competes with your Chat or review requests. You’ll simply notice the Atlas’s sync status update, and new or revised notes appear.Freezing pins the canon
The one thing that overrides all of this is a frozen note. When you freeze a note in the Atlas, the maintenance process leaves it alone, permanently, until you unfreeze it. That’s the intended way to lock in canon: write the definitive version of a character or a rule, freeze it, and the background upkeep will treat it as ground truth.How Memory travels
Memory (your preferences) is part of the same system, but it’s special in one way. It’s injected into every Chat conversation automatically, so your standing instructions apply everywhere without you re-stating them. Turning on Memory Lock in a chat simply tells Quarkle not to write new memories from that conversation.The reader-facing controls (sync, freeze, history, and adding your own notes) are covered in The Story Atlas and Memory.
Next: Safety, privacy & your data
What’s private and how mature content is handled.