Working with the agent

The agent is the panel beside your document. It reads your sources, answers questions about them, finds new material, teaches you a topic, and proposes changes to what you’ve written.

It writes, and it writes properly. Ask for a section and it starts by asking what that section needs to argue, because a draft written before that is settled is a draft you throw away. You work the line out together, it writes from your sources, and every edit lands in the document as a suggestion you keep or undo.

What can I ask it?

Anything you’d ask a well-read colleague who has your reading in front of them.

In practice that’s questions about your sources ("what does this paper actually claim about X?"), requests for material you don’t have yet, and requests to work on the document: tighten this section, make this argument follow from the last one, draft an outline from these notes.

Be specific about which part of the draft you mean. The agent can see your document, but "fix the second half" leaves it guessing where the second half starts, and a vague request earns a vague edit. If a request is ambiguous in a way that matters, it’ll ask rather than pick for you, and wait for your answer.

Can it write a whole section for me?

Yes. "Write the methods section", "add a paragraph on sampling", "let’s write the discussion together" all land in the same place: the Writing Companion.

It doesn’t one-shot a chapter at you. It runs in stages, and each one is a place you can steer:

1. Disposition. Before a word is drafted, it works out what the section is actually arguing and roughly what goes where, asking you wherever that isn’t already settled. You agree the shape together.
2. Draft. It writes, from your sources and the plan you just agreed.
3. Iterate. You react, it revises. This is where most of the quality comes from.
4. Review. A pass over the result before it goes into the document as marked changes.

That staging is the point. A section you agreed the shape of and pushed back on twice is yours in a way a one-shot generation never is, and it’s also just better writing, because the first draft of anything is wrong and the argument is the part only you can supply.

The prose comes out with the house style applied. Em dashes, throat-clearing openers and the other mechanical tells of machine-written text are stripped from authored prose automatically, so you start from something that reads like a person wrote it rather than something you have to de-slop by hand.

For a section that exists but isn’t working, say what’s wrong with it. Rewrites, restructures and tightening all route the same way, and the size of the change decides how much staging it gets.

How do I review what the agent changes?

The agent never silently rewrites your document.

Its changes land in the document as marked edits, insertions and deletions you can see in place, in the paragraph they belong to. Alongside them a Review Changes panel appears above the composer, grouping the changes by the section of your document they touch. Each row names the section, shows how much moved as words added and removed, and carries two controls:

• Keep applies that section’s changes and clears the marks.
• Undo puts the section back exactly as it was.

So you can take the introduction, reject the paragraph where it overreached, and carry on. You’re never forced to swallow a turn’s work whole. If you do want it whole, Keep All and Undo All in the panel header resolve everything at once.

Changes to documents you don’t have open show up in the same panel as their own rows, so an edit can’t hide in a tab you’re not looking at. Files the agent creates, a new document or a spreadsheet, appear as cards in the conversation and open from there.

Marked changes wait. They don’t expire, and closing the panel decides nothing.

Can I get it to ask questions instead of answering?

Yes, and it’s worth knowing about before you need it.

The Thinking Companion works Socratically: it guides you with questions rather than handing over an answer. Ask why your argument isn’t holding together and it won’t give you a fixed paragraph, it’ll ask what the claim depends on until you can see the gap yourself.

Use it when the point is to end up understanding something rather than to end up with text. There’s more on that, and on being taught a topic outright, in studying & learning.

Two more worth naming: Devil’s Advocate argues both sides of a claim using evidence from your sources, and Review Companion reads a draft the way a supervisor would. Both are reached by asking, not by finding a setting.

How do I stay in control of a run?

• Stop it. There’s a stop control while the agent is working. Stopping ends the run where it is; anything already marked in your document stays marked and still waits for you.
• Start a new conversation. When a thread has wandered somewhere unhelpful, a fresh one usually beats arguing it back. Your document and sources are untouched.
• Edit and resend. Click one of your own earlier messages to rewrite it and run again from that point. This one rewinds: the conversation goes back to that message and your document is restored to how it stood then, so anything the agent changed after it is undone. You are asked to confirm first when there are changes to lose. It is the cleanest way to fix a request you phrased badly, as long as you meant to drop what followed.

Still stuck?

If the agent is doing something this page doesn’t explain, tell us what you asked and what it did. That’s the kind of report that gets things fixed.