If you teach, or you're learning

In short. Detecting AI-written work is unreliable, and policing students for it tends to damage trust in both directions. Habitat takes the other road. It gives the student a record of how they worked, signed by them, which they hand in when a course asks for it. Nothing is run on the student. Nothing judges the student.

The questions you might be asking

• My course asks students to disclose how they used AI. What could they show me besides a paragraph saying so?
• Can a student show the development of a piece of writing, not just the final draft?
• If a student worked with a coding agent, can they show what the agent did, and what they refused?
• Who sees the student's work?

What a student can hand in today

A writing history (Words). The student writes beside a text, for example King Lear for a literature course. Each Save downloads a signed file holding their paragraphs, every reading Desk made of them, and their notes, in order. Each save names the one before it, so a gap shows. The student hands in the file. The teacher drops it into Record, which is behind the Desk password until it is fully vetted, and presses Check: Signed says which key signed it and that nothing has changed since.

A session trace (Record). A student who used Claude Code drops their session log into Record. They get the session as plain events, a signed receipt, and three checks: whether the agent repeated something the student refused, whether it wrote outside the folder, and the file's fingerprint. The receipt holds the results, not the log, so the student chooses whether to share the log itself.

The shape of the work, without the words (a gem). A gem shows which paragraphs were read and how they followed one another, with none of the words. Useful when the words are private but the process is the point.

How it fits a course policy

if your course...	a student could hand in
allows AI freely, with a short disclosure	a session receipt, alongside their disclosure
allows AI as a support tool only	a writing history (several saves, so the order of drafts shows), and a session receipt for any agent work
requires a particular AI workflow	the session receipt, as the record of the workflow followed
doesn't allow AI	a writing history across several saves, as the student's own record of their process

In every case the student makes the record and decides to hand it in. Desk keeps drafts in the student's browser, not on a school server.

What it won't do

It won't detect AI-written text, and it won't say whether a student learned. A signature proves which browser's key signed the file, not which person sat at the keyboard. A writing history shows what was typed or pasted into Desk, not what happened elsewhere. Words is in private beta, so a class needs access first.

Go deeper: Words, step by step · Record · What is kept, and where