Using an AI agent
That one shift is the difference between a tool that saves you typing and one that tells you something you did not already know.
Open the agentPlainly: a piece of software you can give a goal to rather than an instruction. A tool does one defined thing when you press it — a spellchecker checks spelling, a calculator calculates. An agent is given a situation and works out what to do about it.
The practical consequence is that you are not limited to the buttons. Everything on our dashboard is a tool — paraphrase, summarise, check. Useful, and each does exactly one thing. The agent is the conversation, and there is no list of what it will accept.
Which is exactly why most people underuse it. Faced with an open box, nearly everybody types something a search engine could have answered — and then concludes the technology is overrated, having only ever asked it to be a worse search engine.
None of these are buttons anywhere. They are things you type, and each produces something a tool with one job cannot.
Each one needs your own text with it. That is the part people miss, including us: send “what is the strongest objection to this argument?” on its own and the agent will reasonably ask which argument. Paste the paragraph, the clause, the note — then the instruction underneath it, or the other way round. It does not mind the order; it minds having something to work on.
Pick one below to see the exact wording. The wording matters more than people expect, which is why the button carries it across rather than asking you to retype it — add your own text when you get there.
Type this
“Read this as my department head, who is short on time and sceptical about the budget. Tell me what you would push back on.”
The single most useful thing you can do with an agent, and almost nobody does it. You are not asking for better prose — you are borrowing a reader you do not have access to before the real one sees it.
It will arrive already typed. Paste what you are working on in with it before you send — on its own it has nothing to read.
Open this in the chat →Give it a role
A sceptical department head, a first-year student, a regulator. An agent with no role answers as nobody in particular, and nobody in particular is not a useful reader.
Say what you do not want
"Do not soften it" and "do not add anything I did not say" do more work than any amount of describing what you do want.
Ask for the strongest version
Of an objection, of a counter-example, of an alternative. Left alone it will offer the easy one, because the easy one is more agreeable.
Push back when it is wrong
It is a conversation. "That is not what I meant, I meant this" gets you further than starting again, and starting again is what most people do.
The other half. These are tools rather than conversations — one defined job each, no wording to get right, on the dashboard.
Paraphraser
Rewrites a sentence you have already written — seventeen modes, including five creative sub-genres and three built for professional documents.
Summarizer
Reduces long text to its substance, with control over length and format.
Grammar check
Spelling, punctuation and clarity, as you write rather than afterwards.
Plagiarism scan
Checks your text against real indexed web sources before anybody else does.
AI detection
Estimates how likely a passage is to be machine-generated. A probability, not a verdict.
Humanizer
Rewrites AI-sounding text so it reads naturally, with the meaning unchanged.
Translate
Between languages, keeping register rather than flattening it.
Citation generator
APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard, formatted correctly the first time.
It will invent a citation if you ask it for one, confidently and in the right format. It does not know what happened last week unless it was told. And it will agree with you far more readily than any real reader ever would, which is why the instruction to push back has to be explicit.
Treat it as a well-read colleague who has not been following the news and is slightly too polite to tell you your argument is thin. Useful, often very. Not a source.
The agent is on the chat page. Try one of the six above on something you have already written — the difference is obvious in a single answer.