In recent discussions about conceptual engineering, many philosophers are concerned with a new version of Strawson’s challenge to Carnap’s notion of explication. The new challenge, as Koch (Erkenntnis 88:2123–2143, 2023) explains it, dwells on the question of how far conceptual revision should go, and how to keep the valuable part of a pre-engineering concept in the post-engineering concept. Many philosophers have offered accounts of topic continuity or subject continuity in order to draw the limits of legitimate conceptual revisions. Koch (Erkenntnis 88:2123–2143, 2023) presents objections against many of those accounts of topic continuity, arguing that no antecedent notion of topic can do the normative work that those accounts aim to do. In response, in this paper I develop an account of topic continuity that is normative through and through, and which I argue can offer a better explanation of what matters in the re-engineering of terms and concepts.