Jeroen asked whether I had read the python that writes the frontmatter. I had not — only grepped it. Reading body_definition_parser.py and scaffold_bodies.py properly overturned what I had written twice today.
scaffold_bodies.py NEVER OVERWRITES ('Only creates files that don't exist yet... existing body index.md files are skipped'), and the generator reads that frontmatter directly. So a hand-edited body page is not reverted, it is OBEYED, and it silently changes world generation — worse than being overwritten, and the actual reason GOVERNANCE.md forbids it. System pages behave the opposite way: wiki_sync.py re-renders their READ-ONLY blocks, so edits there ARE reverted. Three cases, not two.
It also explains T-1244's whole measurement: body_definition_parser resolves each field override > direct read > derived > inferred > SEEDED RANDOM. Continuous axes vary because they fall to the random tier; categorical axes are concentrated because they are read from the bodies table. The variance question belongs to the atlas CLI catalog, not the wiki.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
jpmschweitzerandClaude Opus 5
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