r/Paperlessngx

Paperless-ngx is designed around preserving and organizing documents, while an AI workflow may create summaries, translations, extracted tables, classifications, or rewritten text from those documents. Treating a generated derivative as a new version of the source seems risky because versions share the root document's metadata, and replacing the original would weaken provenance. Treating every derivative as an unrelated document makes it difficult to find what source and revision justified it.

A safer model might keep the consumed source immutable, create each generated result as a separate document, and attach fields for source ASN or ID, source checksum, generator, creation time, review status, and the kind of transformation. Tags could separate generated, reviewed, and superseded material, while links connect a derivative back to its source. A generated item would never inherit the source's retention status automatically.

How would you model this with current Paperless-ngx features? Are custom fields and links enough, or is a sidecar manifest outside Paperless a better source of provenance? When would the file-versions feature be appropriate instead of a linked document?