AI Tools

The AI menu is the way in to the agent. Every entry on it but Cover opens the agent panel; most of them also send the agent a request for you, with the instructions already written.

All of them produce suggestions that you accept or reject — nothing rewrites your manuscript on its own. And none of them do anything you could not ask for yourself: an entry here is a saved request, not a separate tool, so if the result is not quite what you wanted, say so in the same panel and the agent will adjust.

These run on inkdrops, the monthly allowance your plan includes for them. The free plan includes none, so the entries offer a link to change plan instead. On the Standard plan and above you can also have AI usage billed to your own account by saving a key under My Account — that work spends no inkdrops. See Your Account and Plan.

Inkdrops

Running these tools costs real money, so your plan includes an allowance for them, counted in inkdrops.

Every tool on this menu spends inkdrops, and they do not all spend them at the same rate. Looking up a citation costs a fraction of an inkdrop; a Copyeditor pass over one chapter costs a few; building an index for a whole book costs a good deal more. The rule of thumb is simply how much work you asked for — the longer the text and the more thorough the job, the more inkdrops it takes. The agent panel shows how many you have left as you work; the ? beside the count brings you back to this page.

Your plan's inkdrops refill at the start of each month. You can see how many you have used in the Usage section of Your Account and Plan, shown as used / allowed.

Buying more

On any paid plan you can buy extra inkdrops with Buy Inkdrops on the My Account page. They come in packs of 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000, with the larger packs cheaper per inkdrop. Bought inkdrops never expire, and they are only spent once the month's inkdrops are gone — so a pack you buy today is still there next month if you never needed it.

Running out

If you run out, the AI tools stop, and the agent panel shows what you can do about it:

• Upgrade Plan — move to a plan with a larger monthly allowance.
• Buy Inkdrops — top up straight away, on a paid plan.
• Use Your Own AI Key or Connect an AI Assistant — on the Standard plan and above, work on your own key, or in an assistant you connect, spends no inkdrops.

Otherwise the tools wait until your inkdrops refill at the start of your next month. Nothing else is affected — writing, editing, formatting, exporting and publishing carry on exactly as before. It is only these tools that pause.

Inkdrops pay for AI run on Inkwell's account. If you have saved your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini key, that work is billed to you by the provider directly and spends no inkdrops at all. An xAI key covers the heavier tools only, so the small jobs — citation lookup and equation conversion — still run on Inkwell's key and still spend inkdrops. Cover art is painted only on an OpenAI key; with any other, it runs on Inkwell's key too.

Open Agent

Opens the panel without starting anything, so you can ask your own question. Everything the agent can do is reachable from here.

Copyeditor

Copyeditor goes through the current chapter and commits the changes an editor would make. If you have a range selected it copyedits only that; otherwise the whole chapter.

Two settings, both remembered between runs:

Tone — Neutral, Academic, Professional, Concise, Conversational, Friendly or Creative. What the prose should sound like.

Level — how far to go. This is the one that matters most, because the difference between a pass you barely notice and one that rewrites half your sentences is entirely here:

• Proofread — typos, spelling, punctuation, plainly wrong grammar. Nothing else, however tempting. Clumsy phrasing is not an error at this level and is left alone.
• Light — the above, plus agreement errors and sentences that are genuinely confusing. Word choice and rhythm are left alone.
• Standard — the above, plus wordiness, repetition, weak constructions and sentences harder to follow than they need to be. This is the default.
• Thorough — the above, plus rephrasing for clarity and rhythm, and splitting or merging sentences.

No level changes what a sentence means, adds information, or restructures your argument, and none of them touch your equations, citations, cross-references or footnote markers. Quoted material is left alone as well — it is not yours to correct. Where the agent thinks something is worth changing but your level does not cover it, it leaves a comment saying so instead.

The request runs in read-write mode, so the suggestions go into the chapter under the reply's chip. Open the chip to see them marked, and accept or reject them in the text or all at once — see the agent.

Feedback

Where the Copyeditor edits sentences, Feedback reads the chapter for its ideas: whether the central claim is clear and sustained, whether the sections earn each step, where a claim is unsupported or overstated, where it would be stronger for being cut. It will raise spelling, punctuation and awkward phrasing where it sees them, but in passing — it is asked to keep them in proportion rather than list every one, since the Copyeditor is the tool for that.

It leaves each point as a comment on the passage it is about, and posts one report. The report opens with a grade — the letter a university professor would put on the chapter if it were handed in — then the overall assessment, what is working, and what to fix first in priority order.

It runs in comment mode, so it cannot change your text while doing it.

Book Index

Book Index builds an index for the whole book: it reads the manuscript, decides the entries, and marks up every occurrence that genuinely belongs to one.

Three options control the scope:

• Index Front Matter — include front matter.
• Index Back Matter — include back matter.
• Include Footnotes — index the notes as well as the body.

Indexing a whole book is a long job. It runs in the panel where you can watch it and stop it at any point, and it reports what it indexed and what it decided to leave out. Editing the result is covered in Index.

Cover

Cover opens the cover designer rather than the agent panel. There you can design a cover with the AI step by step, or ask the agent to design and refine the printed cover with you.

What the AI sees

The agent reads the actual documents your book is made of, not a flattened copy of the text, so it can see more than the words: which paragraph style something is in, whether a heading is a chapter or a section, what the book's settings are, and where things land once the book is typeset.

Equations, citations, cross-references and footnotes are all visible to it as what they are rather than as loose text, which is how it can tell whether a sentence agrees with the equation beside it or matches the work it cites. It will not rewrite any of them.

Your comments are visible to it — that is what lets it answer a note you left yourself, and what lets Feedback avoid repeating a point you have already made. In comment and read-write mode it can start a thread, reply to one and mark it with an emoji, whichever of you began it — but it can rewrite or withdraw only what it wrote itself; it will not touch your words.

Connect AI Assistant

The last item on the menu is the one thing here that does nothing to your book by itself. It opens the settings that decide whether an assistant of your own — Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, or anything else that accepts a remote MCP connector — may reach this project, and how much it may do when it does. Each of those assistants has its own rules about which of its plans can connect; see Connecting an AI assistant for the plan each one needs and the steps.