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Managing Styles

Style guides live as JSON files in cody-projects/article-writer/styles/. Three commands let you manage them. All are plain-language phrases — Cody Article Writer has no :cody-prefixed commands.

List

Trigger: “list my writing styles” / “show my styles”

Cody reads every JSON file in cody-projects/article-writer/styles/ and lists them by name + description:

You have these saved styles:


1. Professional LinkedIn
   For thought leadership articles targeting enterprise product managers


2. Casual Newsletter
   Conversational tone for weekly subscriber updates


3. Technical Tutorial
   Step-by-step explainers for engineering audiences

The list is alphabetical by filename. There’s no concept of a “default” style — every article’s Phase 3 (Style Selection) asks you to pick one.

Edit

Trigger: “edit my X style” (where X is the style name)

Cody:

  1. Loads the JSON for X.
  2. Shows the current configuration in the same format as the style creation Review phase.
  3. Asks what to change.
  4. Updates the requested fields and re-validates.
  5. Saves back to styles/<X>.json.

You can iterate as many times as needed. Cody won’t change anything you don’t explicitly ask for — if you say “increase humor to 5”, only humor changes; tone, opinion, technical all stay where they were.

What you can change

Every field except the filename. Voice sliders, formatting fields, structure arrays, context strings and numbers — all editable. Editing the name changes the description string in the JSON but does not rename the file (filename stays kebab-case from the original name).

If you want to rename the file too, delete the style and re-create it with the new name. There’s no rename command.

Edits propagate forward, not backward

Style edits affect future articles, not past ones. If you edit professional-linkedin.json after exporting an article that used it, the exported article and its archived JSON are unchanged. The next article that picks professional-linkedin will use the updated settings.

This matters when you’re tuning a style over time — your already-shipped articles are pinned to whatever settings they used at write time. Re-export from archive will use the current style settings.

Delete

Trigger: “delete the X style”

Cody asks for explicit confirmation:

Are you sure you want to delete “X”? This cannot be undone.

On “yes”, the JSON file is removed from styles/. No backup is kept.

What gets affected

  • Future articles can’t pick this style in Phase 3 — it’s gone from the list.
  • Past articles are unaffected. The exported .md files are static; the archived draft JSONs still reference the style by filename slug but don’t store its content, so a re-export of a past article that used a deleted style will fail (or fall back to a default — current behavior is to fail and prompt you to pick a different style).

If you’re cleaning up old styles, take a moment first to check whether you have archived drafts that referenced them via “show my archive” — there’s no automated check.

Direct file edits

You can also edit style JSONs directly in your editor — they’re plain JSON, validated by the schema in Storage & Data. Direct edits skip Cody’s validation flow, so:

  • Make sure required fields stay present (everything covered in the per-category pages).
  • Slider values must be integers 0–10.
  • blockquotes, visual_breaks, examples must use the exact enum strings.
  • opening, closing, example_types are arrays with at least one valid value.

If validation fails when an article tries to use the style, Cody surfaces the error and prompts you to fix it.