Handing the assistant a long job
The assistant works at two speeds. At your elbow it answers a question or rewrites a sentence. Handed a whole job — annotate this book, translate this document, draft a report from this folder — it plans, shows you the plan, then works for minutes or hours while you do something else. It is the same assistant either way; how much you hand over is decided job by job.
Where the assistant is
- The start page — one box. Once you send, the conversation opens across the main area, so a plan or a long answer is readable where it appears.
- The panel beside a document —
⌘L(Ctrl+Lon Windows) opens it with the cursor in the message box; press it again from inside the panel to hide it. With text selected in a document, it brings the selection along. The document you have open is offered to the conversation without pasting. - Inside the editor — select text and ask; the result is a tracked change.
Pointing it at material
| Type | What it does |
|---|---|
@ a document | That document is must-read — it is read in full |
@ a folder | The folder's documents become the subject of the question |
/ | Lists skills; pick one to apply its method to the job |
By default the assistant can also search the rest of your knowledge base when it needs to. The line above the input says what the scope is. These N only narrows the conversation to the documents you added — no knowledge base, no web — and it will say so rather than reach further. Open it up puts the default back.
Jobs it takes on
| Job | Start it | You approve first | You get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Draft a report, an essay or a book from your sources | Ask in the assistant: "write a report on these papers for my team" | The outline | A Markdown draft in artifacts/ |
| Translate a whole document | Ask in the assistant, or Translate in the reader's AI menu | The glossary | A translated file in translations/ |
| Revise a draft | Ask in the assistant with the draft added, or comment and revise | — | Grouped tracked changes, saved only when accepted — a Word file as Word tracked changes |
| Annotate a whole document | Pick a lens in the reader's AI menu | The lens you pick | Notes in the margin and a write-up |
| Review someone else's draft | Review this document… in the reader's AI menu | The review focus, if you give one | Notes for the author, a review memo, and a - reviewed.docx with the comments you keep |
| Recognise a scanned PDF | Recognize text with AI in the reader | — | Text for every page, with a quality report |
The approval comes first
It does the work without asking; it does not choose the direction without asking. Anything with a shape you would argue about comes to you before the expensive part:
- An outline before a draft is written. Approve it, reply with what to change, or comment on particular sections and send it back — only those sections are replanned. While it waits, the input says Reply "confirm" to start generation, or suggest changes.
- A glossary before a translation runs.
- Rewrites of text you already have arrive as tracked changes, never as replacements.
While it runs
Work lands as each part finishes — a chapter annotated, a section drafted, a batch of pages recognised — so you can read the first section while the third is still being written. Answers and drafts carry citation marks back to the pages they drew on.
A large job may first show what it is likely to cost. If your weekly credits will not cover it, you can start it anyway (it pauses at a checkpoint when credits run out and resumes after the next grant), schedule it for when they come back, or run it in economy mode at about half the cost but up to a day slower.
Stopping and resuming
Stopping is a pause, not a cancel. What was finished is already saved in your folder, and the conversation shows Task paused — progress kept. Press Resume, or say "continue", and it picks up where it stopped instead of planning again.
The same happens on its own when credits run out or a sign-in expires: the job pauses with progress kept, and resumes when you say so.
Jobs run on your machine. Close the app or let the laptop sleep and the job stops — what was finished is on disk and it resumes from there, but you cannot start a six-hour translation and shut the lid.
Looking things up online
When your folder does not hold the answer, the assistant can search the web for the gap. The pages it actually cited are listed as numbered references at the end of the answer. When an answer rests on a figure that goes out of date, it re-checks it in the background and appends a correction if the world has moved on.
A lookup is a few searches in the middle of answering, not a survey of a field. When it matters, put the sources into your folder and ask again. Narrowing the scope to These N only turns web search off for that conversation.
Where the results go
Everything it produces is a file in your folder: drafts and collected notes in artifacts/,
translations in translations/, annotations in the document's margin (stored in the hidden
.mindmax folder). Past conversations are
listed in the chat history, searchable, and grouped by day.
Tips
- Try the shape on one chapter first. The first one tells you whether the outline, the tone or the lens is right — far cheaper than finding out at chapter nine.
- Spend your attention on the gates. Two minutes on an outline saves an evening.
- It cannot choose the argument for you. It will finish a badly conceived draft as diligently as a good one.