Every Attempt Is Kept

"Attempt one is clumsy. Keep it anyway — it's the first point on a curve you can't see any other way."

The Attempt Is Sacred

When you upload a drawing to be graded, the engine stores it append-only — preserved exactly as you drew it, before any answer key touched it. This is not a storage detail; it's what makes the grade mean something. You are being scored on the construction you actually committed to, not a version cleaned up after seeing the answer. The moment you could edit an attempt post-hoc, the grade would measure your editing, not your seeing. The attempt is frozen precisely so it can stay honest.

Fitting Your Drawing

To grade your construction against the reference, the engine first has to find the construction in your drawing — the same fitting problem as the reference, aimed at your marks. It auto-detects where it can, and where it can't, it seeds from the reference fit and lets you correct it with the same drag handles you'd use anywhere else. Your drawing gets exactly the same treatment as the photo: propose a fit, let a human correct it, keep everything recoverable. Symmetry between how the reference and your attempt are fit is what makes the eventual comparison fair.

Never Overwrite an Attempt

A second attempt is a new record, never a mutation of the first. Your list of attempts accumulates into a practice archive, and — following the family's oldest rule — you archive, never prune. Attempt one's wobble is not an embarrassment to delete; it's the baseline that makes attempt fifty legible. Treating your own early clumsiness as data rather than shame is a quiet but real part of what the engine is teaching. The record is kept so the growth can be seen.

Why This Matters for Learning

Deliberate practice improves you across reps, but you can only steer it if you can see the trend, and you can only see the trend if the reps are preserved. If each attempt overwrote the last, you'd have exactly one data point — today — and no curve. Append-only storage is the progress bar: it turns a pile of individual drawings into a visible trajectory. The humble decision to never overwrite is what upgrades practice from 'did I feel better today' to 'here is my angle-accuracy over fifty attempts.'

Code

Attempts accumulate; nothing is overwritten·python

# An attempt is append-only: preserved exactly, never overwritten.
attempt = Attempt(
    drawing = uploaded_image,        # your construction, exactly as drawn
    ts      = created_at,
)
session.attempts.append(attempt)     # a NEW record; attempts[-2] is untouched

# To grade, the engine fits YOUR drawing too -- auto-detect, else seed + correct:
fit = detect_construction(attempt.drawing) \
      or seed_from(reference_fit).then_correct(drag_handles)

# The whole list of attempts is the practice archive: archive, never prune.
# Attempt 1 and attempt 50 both live forever -- that is how you see the curve.

Exercise

Pick a skill where you currently keep no record of your attempts — you just practice and move on. Imagine keeping every single attempt, dated, not just your best ones. What could you suddenly see about your progress that's invisible now? What would you be tempted to delete out of embarrassment, and why is deleting it the wrong move?

Hint

Without a record you're guessing at your own trajectory from memory, which flatters recent reps and forgets the early ones. Keeping everything — especially the clumsy early attempts — is what turns 'I think I'm improving' into a measurable curve. The urge to delete the bad ones is exactly the urge that erases your own baseline.