Writing a long document
This is the longest job the assistant takes on: a report, an essay, a thesis chapter or a whole book, drafted from the material in your folder, with you deciding the direction at the points where it is cheap to change.
Looking for the canvas? It has its own guide now — thinking on the canvas. A branch from the canvas can be handed to this pipeline as a ready-made outline.
Before you start
Your source material in the folder — papers, notes, earlier drafts — and some idea of what you are writing and for whom.
Step 1: say what you are writing and for whom
In the assistant, describe the piece: the topic, the reader, the purpose, the rough length, and
which sources to draw on (@ a folder or documents). Length, audience and purpose decide the
shape:
- A short piece stays one flat document without sub-headings.
- A longer piece gets sections.
- Something book-length gets parts, chapters and sections, with a contents page generated from that structure.
The target length is a rough budget. A draft that comes out short is deepened rather than padded, and one that runs long is not cut just to hit the number.
Step 2: approve the outline
This gate is not optional. The outline — with a writing charter: thesis, target reader, voice — opens in the editor before anything is drafted. Press Confirm outline, reply with what to change, or comment on specific sections and send it back — only the sections you commented on are replanned.
Expect two or three rounds here. This is the cheapest place in the entire project to change your mind — far cheaper than discovering the problem in chapter seven.
Step 3: judge a sample (book-length only)
For a book, it stops after the first few sections and shows you the prose. Read it properly and tell it, in a sentence, what is off about the tone — that note steers every chapter after it. Do not wave this through: it is the cheapest point to decide whether the rest is worth running.
Step 4: the rest gets drafted
Sections arrive as they are finished, with verbatim quotes that click back to your sources, so you can read chapter one while chapter three is being written. Chapters are written against the outline and against ledgers of what earlier chapters already claimed, defined and promised — that is what stops chapter nine contradicting chapter two.
Before handing a chapter over, it reviews its own draft and fixes what it finds. Those fixes are part of drafting, not tracked changes; every issue is logged as fixed or not, so you can see what was left.
Stopping is a pause. Press Resume or say "continue" and it carries on from where it stopped instead of planning again. See handing the assistant a long job.
Step 5: revise the manuscript
From here it is your document. Ask for changes in the assistant, or comment on the draft and revise from your comments — edits arrive as grouped tracked changes, each with its reason. See reviewing and revising with AI.
Step 6: export
Word or PDF, with the same typography you saw on screen, equations and numbered sources included. See exporting to Word, PDF or images.
Where the files live
A longer piece is written into artifacts/writing/<title>/:
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
<title>.md | The manuscript — edit it like any note |
process/00-outline.md | The outline you approved |
process/00b-charter.md | Thesis, reader and voice |
process/03-glossary.md | Every term, and where it was first defined |
process/04-reviews.md | Chapter reviews — each issue marked fixed or not |
process/chapters/ | Each chapter as its own file |
All of it is Markdown. Nothing is locked in an app database, and you can open the draft in any editor.
What it will not do
- Judge whether the idea is any good. That stays yours.
- Sound exactly like you. The charter and the sample note get the tone close, not identical.
- Write fiction. It does not track characters, plot or a story's timeline.
- Run unattended end to end. The outline gate exists on purpose.
- Fact-check the world. It writes from your sources and quotes them; whether the sources are right is a separate question.