Punch-In — origin note¶

Written: 2026-06-14 · Owner: Mohsen Seyedkazemi Ardebili Shipped as: design/specs/punch-in.md Tier: design/ — public. Historical origin note; the spec above is the current source of truth.

The idea¶

The pitch borrowed the DAW analogy directly: punch-in recording lets a musician re-perform just the wrong bar and splice it seamlessly into the take, with no rewind and no cutting tape. Dictation correction is the same shape of problem — a known-good region, a bad span, and a re-performance that has to align and splice — except the machine, not an engineer, has to find the bad span from the re-performance alone. The card was explicit that this is where the dream meets an empirical ceiling: naive re-dictation of a wrong phrase has a documented tendency to fail the same way twice, so the design had to build the recognizer's own failure mode into the correction UX rather than assume repetition alone fixes it.

What shipped¶

src/yazses/postprocess/punch_in.py locates the spans in the recent dictated buffer closest to a re-spoken phrase and proposes a replacement, wired to the punch-in feature toggle (off by default). It matches the constrained scope the original decision gate picked: alignment against the recent buffer, not an open-ended edit history, and it shares its correction-event signal with the encrypted learning corpus (ADR-012) as ground truth, exactly as flagged in the original card.