How Conversational Design Systems has changed over time. Each entry preserves an earlier published version; the live book stays canonical.
2026-09-30 version
The version published before the 2026-09-30 editorial pass. That pass changed no claim, source, law, table, code sample, or glossary definition. It rewrote about a hundred sentences to remove habits of machine-drafted prose: the two-beat reversal (“not this. It is that.”) restated as one direct sentence, paired aphorisms that closed paragraphs merged or cut, narrator asides that told the reader what mattered removed, colon drumrolls and self-answered questions turned into plain sentences, dramatic fragments completed, and filler intensifiers deleted.
2026-09-20 version
The version published before the 2026 audit. That audit restored two dropped words in the Air Canada quotation, corrected the passenger’s pronoun, said precisely what happened to the DPD bot (its AI element was switched off), repointed four sources whose pages had moved or changed (OpenAI Agents, OpenAI plugin UI guidelines, Google’s conversation design guidance, Erika Hall’s book), and added System One decision models in three places: the intent step of the governed turn in chapter 5, a paragraph in the runtime chapter on why typed decisions with calibrated probabilities change the economics of the deterministic column, and a TypeSafe reference in the sources appendix. The same day’s editorial pass put the runtime pipeline in the same order the rest of the book uses, added the graph node two edges already pointed at, unified the profile version, the transfer tool’s name, and the review threshold across chapters, earned Law 11 in chapter 10, merged a duplicated glossary entry and added three missing ones, retired hedges the industry had settled (MCP, A2A, generative UI as a renderer), and cut one redundant running-case note. Later the same day the sources appendix adopted a policy of one hub link per vendor, retiring four OpenAI documentation pages.
2026-09-03 version
The version published before the 2026 audit corrected how New York City's MyCity chatbot ended. The chapter on context and provenance said the city quietly ended the bot's beta. The record is louder than that: a new administration announced the shutdown at a budget press conference, called the bot functionally unusable, and took it down in 2026. The timeline the chapter relies on, almost two years after The Markup's reporting, is unchanged.
2026-07-21 version
The version published before the 2026 audit corrected the size of the runnable companion repository. The chapter on expressing architecture in code, and the matching note in the sources appendix, both described corredor-control-plane as about four hundred lines; a fresh clone measures 486 lines of TypeScript across src/, so both now read about five hundred. The book invites readers to clone the repo and check, which is what made the drift worth fixing.
