reviewing what an ai actually changed in my chapter is harder than the writing was

Something I didn't expect about writing with AI in my program: the writing got faster and the reviewing got way worse. I hand a messy section to a model, get back something cleaner, and then realize I can't reconstruct what it changed versus what was mine. It reads fine, which is exactly the problem.

Git sort of helps if your whole workflow lives in git, but a commit diff lumps my edits and the agent's edits into one blob. What I actually want is to see it at the level of this sentence, this citation, this claim came from the model, and here's the version I wrote. Especially anything with a reference attached, because that's the spot where I stop trusting it.

and there's a quieter version of this for the thesis itself. if a committee member asks whether I wrote something, "mostly" is not a great answer, and honestly sometimes I'm genuinely not sure anymore. the agent produces more in an afternoon than I can carefully read in a day, so the pile of unreviewed text just keeps growing.

Genuinely unsure what the right habit is here. Do you box the agent into a scratch doc and diff it back by hand, or just refuse to let it near anything with a citation and write those parts yourself.