Reviewing and revising with AI

Every edit the AI makes to your text reaches you the same way: marked on the text itself, waiting for you to accept or reject it. Nothing is written to the file until you do. This guide covers the three ways to ask for edits and how to review what comes back.

Before you start

A Markdown document, a Word file (.docx) or a PDF in your folder. Markdown can be revised every way below; Word files and PDFs are revised from a request in the assistant — see Word files and PDFs. Ebooks and slides are read and annotated, not edited.

Three ways to ask

You want	Do this	Comes back as
One sentence or paragraph changed	Select it and use the AI at the cursor	One suggestion, accepted or rejected as a whole
A change across the whole document	Describe it once in the assistant	Groups of edits, each with a title and a reason
Fixes at the places you marked	Comment on the passages, then revise from the comments	Groups of edits, each naming the comment it answers

The first is covered in writing in the editor. The other two are below.

Describing a change once

With the document open, type /rewrite in the assistant — the open document is added to the conversation — and say what should change: "the argument in section three is loose", "make the terminology consistent", "cut the repetition". You can also @ the document and ask in plain words.

It reads the whole document first, works out where the change has to land, splits a compound request into separate edits and groups them. Add several documents and one request can span them — a term renamed across a set of chapters, for example.

Revising from your comments

1. Comment where it is wrong. Select a passage and leave a comment, the way you would on a colleague's draft. Repeat for as many places as you like.
2. Say what you want, plainly. "This contradicts section two, keep the later figure" gets the edit you meant. Setting the comment's intent to Rewrite makes the request unmistakable, but any comment with text counts. A bare highlight with no remark does not.
3. Revise. Open the Comments panel and press Revise from all N — or tick a few comments and revise from just those.

Comments set to Rewrite, and Revise from all 4.

A comment it cannot act on safely is set aside with the reason and a retry, rather than carried out on a guess.

Comment intents

A comment can carry an intent, which decides what the AI does with it:

Intent	What happens
Note	Just a thought. The AI can read it; the document is untouched.
Question	You want an answer grounded in the text, or an honest "not covered".
Rewrite	You want this changed. Only on documents you can edit.
Doubtful	The claim looks off. It is checked against your knowledge base and the web for a verdict and a quote.
Needs a source	You want something checkable. It goes looking for the original source.

On a PDF, a Word file or an ebook the same panel offers Answer comments and Verify & find sources instead of revising. To revise a Word file or a PDF, describe the change in the assistant instead.

Reviewing what comes back

The revision opens with a short summary of what it is about to change and what it left alone, then the groups. Each group has a title, the reason for it and — when it came from a comment — the comment it answers.

The revision: a summary, groups that name their comment, and one comment set aside with the reason.

• Step through the changes with previous / next, rather than scrolling to hunt for them.
• Accept or reject group by group, or all at once.
• Conflicts are flagged. Two groups that touch the same words cannot both apply; accepting one offers to reject the other.
• Lost citations are flagged. A group that would drop a footnote, a citation or a link says so before you accept it.
• Apply. Nothing is written until you press Apply accepted. Reject everything and the file is exactly as it was.

After applying, comments behind the accepted groups are marked done. Rejected ones stay open, so you can sharpen them and run another round on what is left.

tip

Three or four precise comments make a better round than one vague request. "Make it better" gets a confident pass that changes everything and improves nothing.

Word files and PDFs

@ the file in the assistant and describe the change, the same way as for a Markdown document. The edits come back in groups for you to review on the file's text; what happens when you apply depends on the format.

A .docx under review: the same groups and marks as a Markdown document.

A Word file is changed in place — the same .docx, not a copy.

• Write as Word tracked changes is ticked by default at the bottom of the review. Each accepted edit becomes a Word revision mark, so whoever opens the file in Word can accept or reject it there. Untick it to change the text directly.
• The author name on those changes comes from Settings → Editor → Revision author; left empty, it uses your account name or your computer's user name.
• Only the text of the paragraphs that change is rewritten. Paragraph styles, numbering, the header and footer, images, fields and comments are carried over as they are.
• A change it cannot make safely — inside a page-number or table-of-contents field, inside a content control, or one that would add or remove a table column — is left out, and the result lists it.
• Before writing, the edited file is checked against what you accepted. If the check fails, the original is left untouched.

If the document already holds tracked changes from someone else, a bar at the top of its reading view says how many and whose, with Accept all, Reject all and Open in Word. Before it revises, the assistant suggests Accept all, then revise, so its edits are not mixed in with the old ones — or choose Keep them and revise.

A PDF is never changed itself. When you apply, a Markdown file with the same name is created next to the PDF, holding its text with the edits you accepted (if that file already exists, the edits go into it). Reject everything and nothing is created. Export the copy to PDF or Word when you need a file again — in MindMax's layout, not the original's. For a long PDF or a scanned one, the assistant first says what to expect and waits for Continue editing; a scan whose text has not been recognised needs Recognize text with AI first.

Undoing after the fact

An applied revision is a version in the document's history. File → Browse Version History… shows what changed and restores an earlier version — see history and memory.

When it will not start

Message	What to do
The document has unsaved changes	Save or discard them first, so the review is against what is on disk.
The document changed after the revisions were generated	Your edits moved the text underneath. Generate the revision again.
This document is read-only	Comments on a PDF, ebook, Word file or slides cannot be turned into edits. Answer them, collect them into a note, or — for a Word file or PDF — describe the change in the assistant.
The file is open in Word	Close it in Word, then apply.
The pre-write self-check failed	Nothing was written. Generate the revision again; if it keeps failing, edit that part in Word.

What it will not do

• Revise a Word file or a PDF from comments, or read comments collaborators left in a Word file as instructions.
• Revise the headers, footers, footnotes or text boxes of a Word file, or change the PDF itself.
• Put tracked-change marks into a Markdown document exported to Word — export carries only what you accepted. Tracked changes in Word come from revising a .docx you already have.
• Ask you to approve a separate revision plan. The plan arrives as the groups themselves.

Next

• Writing in the editor
• Exporting to Word, PDF or images
• Revise a draft from feedback — the same round as a workflow