What an AI can and cannot do in your books

The short version

A connected AI works as you, in your books, and only when you ask. It can read and write much of what you can, it can't delete anything, and everything it does is saved in the book's history where you can see it and undo it. If that's all you wanted to know, you can stop here.

It sees what you see

When an AI connects, it signs in as you. So it can open the books you can open—your own, and any you've been invited to—and in each one it has the same role you do. On a book you own it can do nearly everything; on a book where you're an editor it can suggest and comment, as you would. It can't reach anyone else's books, and it can't do anything in yours that you couldn't do yourself.

What it can help with

• Reading. Your Library, a book's outline, chapters and scenes as prose, your notes, front and back matter, book lists, the codex, who's on a book, and past builds.
• Writing. Drafting new scenes or whole chapters, revising a scene, finding and replacing across a book, putting chapters and scenes in order, keeping and tagging notes, filling in front and back matter, and looking after the codex—entries, facts, links, calendars, even new types and fields.
• Organizing. Making series, books, parts, pen names and universes; moving a book from one series to another; setting imprints; building a book to PDF or EPUB and telling you where the file is.
• Reviewing. Leaving comments and replying to them, and proposing changes as suggestions for you to accept or reject.
• Tidying. Archiving a chapter, scene, note or codex entry, and bringing it back. Nothing it archives is lost.

What it can't do, on purpose

A few things are kept for people, no matter how an AI is connected:

• Deleting. No AI can delete a book, chapter, scene, note or entry. Deleting is something you do yourself, from the editor.
• Inviting or removing collaborators. An invitation goes out in your name, so it waits for you.
• Accepting or rejecting suggestions, resolving comments, or marking a scene reviewed. These decide what the book is, and that stays with you.

Its changes arrive as suggestions

When an AI revises a scene that already has words in it, nothing is overwritten. The difference between what was there and what it sent shows up as suggestions—the same underlines and strike-throughs you'd see from a human editor—and you accept or reject each one in the Review rail. Until you do, the page still reads as you left it.

There is one exception, and it's there to help. If you've outlined a chapter and added scenes that have no words yet, and you ask an AI to draft them, the draft goes straight onto the page as new content rather than arriving as a wall of suggestions with nothing to compare them to. The scene is marked Written by an AI agent until you've read it and marked it reviewed; once it has words, any further change from an AI comes as suggestions like everything else.

A blank line counts as content too. If you leave a line of air under a point-of-view name at the top of a scene and an AI leaves it out, or an AI adds one you didn't have, that shows up as a suggestion like any other—a line of air—for you to keep or not.

It won't trample your edits

When an AI rewrites a scene, it has to say which version of the scene it read. If you (or another AI) changed that scene in the meantime, the write is politely refused and the AI is told to read it again and reapply its change. Two hands in one scene can't quietly undo each other.

Everything is in the history

Each save an AI makes is a version in the scene's history, just like your own saves, and it shows under your name—the AI is acting for you. If you ever don't like what it did, open the scene's history and bring back the version you want.