An AI should never rewrite your document silently
AI edits to your writing should arrive as tracked changes — deletions struck through, insertions marked, inside your own text — so anything without a mark is exactly what you wrote and you can accept or reject each change. The alternative, a rewritten copy, forces a choice between rereading everything and trusting an edit you never saw.
On a paragraph, a rewritten copy is a small annoyance. On a chapter, it is the reason people stop letting AI touch anything that matters.
The problem with "here is the improved version"
Ask most assistants to tighten a section and you get a fresh copy of it. It reads well. It is also a different text, and somewhere in it:
- a hedge you chose deliberately ("may", "in most cases") is gone,
- a citation or footnote quietly dropped out,
- a sentence that was fine has been rephrased for no reason,
- a term you defined carefully has been swapped for a synonym.
To find those you have to compare the two versions line by line — longer than making the edits yourself. So people do one of two things. They accept the whole copy and hope, or they stop asking.
Neither is a good outcome for a tool whose job is to save you time on writing that matters.
What "edits wait for you" means
The rule we built around is simple to state: an AI may add to your files, but may not replace what you wrote on its own.
- A change to existing text — a rewrite at the cursor, an edit you asked for in a conversation, a revision from comments you left — comes back marked in place and is written only if you accept it.
- New material — a note the assistant creates, a translation saved beside the original — is written directly, because asking permission for every new file is friction with no safety in it.
- Every write the AI makes is kept as a version you can restore.
The first point is the one that changes how editing feels. If unmarked text is certain to be untouched, you only have to read the marks.
What makes tracked AI edits actually usable
Marking the changes is necessary but not enough. A revision of a whole chapter can easily be a hundred small edits, and a hundred individual accept buttons is its own kind of unreadable. What helped:
Group the changes and say why. A revision arrives as groups — "tighten the opening", "make the terminology consistent", "answer comment 3" — each with a one-line reason. You judge the intention once, then skim the marks that carry it out.
Flag what was lost. Footnotes, citations and links are meant to survive an edit. A group that drops one anyway carries a warning, so you see the loss before accepting it, not after sending the document.
Do not write until you say so. Your file is untouched while you review. Only the groups you accept are written.
Keep applied changes reversible. Accepted is not final. A change you regret tomorrow is one step back in the document's history.
Where it does not apply
- Your own typing is not tracked. This is about how AI edits reach you. What you type goes straight into the file, and into its history.
- A cursor suggestion is one change. Select a whole chapter and ask for a rewrite at the cursor, and you get one change too big to judge. For that, describe the change in a conversation or leave comments, and it comes back as many small groups.
- Export is not Word's revision mode. Exporting a Markdown document to Word gives you the accepted text, not a file full of revision marks. A Word file you ask the AI to revise is different: the same review happens in MindMax, and the edits you accept are written into the .docx as Word tracked changes — see how to have AI edit a Word document with tracked changes.
- Judgement is still yours. Marks tell you what changed, not whether the change is right.
How it looks in practice is on tracked AI edits; the rule itself is written up as edits wait for you, and the walkthrough is reviewing AI revisions. If you have a draft and a stack of feedback, revise a draft from feedback is the workflow.