Get the document back edited,not retyped
Paste a specification into a chat window and you get prose back: correct, maybe, but stripped of the client template, the numbering, the tables and the logo you now have to rebuild by hand. A Khint agent can hand back the file itself, edited. Same .docx, same styles, same layout, with only the wording you asked it to fix actually changed.
The rewrite is five minutes,
putting it back is an hour
A stakeholder sends a functional specification in the company template. You need one consistent terminology pass through forty pages before it goes to the vendor. The AI part of that job is genuinely easy. The expensive part is everything after: copying the answer back paragraph by paragraph, restoring the heading levels, noticing on page 19 that the numbered list turned into bullets, checking that nobody dropped the table in section 4. That reassembly is why most people quietly decide the document is fine as it is.
Copy into a chat window
You get text back, so the template, styles and images are gone.
Every paragraph is regenerated, so every paragraph needs checking.
Rebuilding the document is manual, and it is the longest part.
Run a Khint agent on it
You get the same file back, edited, as a new copy.
Only the paragraphs that changed were written, so you review a short diff.
There is no reassembly step, because nothing was taken apart.
From a file on disk to an edited copy
One switch in the agent editor, then your usual shortcut.
Tell the agent it works on a file, and what it hands back
In an agent’s editor, set its input source to Document. A second control appears right underneath: what the agent gives you. Leave it on Text and the result lands in your clipboard, as usual. Switch it to The edited file and the same document comes back rewritten instead. That one switch is the whole difference between reading a document and editing it.
Run it on the file, from the palette or its shortcut
Nothing else changes about how you launch it. The agent can ask you for a file each run (a drop zone, your recent files, a browse button) or stay pinned to one document that keeps evolving. Before the run starts, the palette shows what the edit will cost in credits, so a forty-page specification never surprises you. Cancel at that point and nothing is written and nothing is charged.
The model proposes wording, Khint writes the file
The AI never sees a .docx. It receives the document as numbered paragraphs and returns only the ones it actually changed. Every byte of file structure is written locally by Khint from your original: the template, the styles, the theme, the images, the headers and footers are copied straight through. A model can suggest better wording; it has no way to corrupt your document.
Read the diff before anything leaves your machine
The run opens a preview window listing every paragraph that changed, old text above, new text below, with the changed stretch highlighted so you can scan it in seconds rather than re-reading the file. Nothing is sent anywhere: from there you either download the edited copy where you want it, reveal it in your file browser, or ignore it because the rewrite was not what you wanted.
Untouched paragraphs stay byte for byte identical
This is the part a chat window cannot offer. Paragraphs the agent left alone are not regenerated, reflowed or reformatted: they are the original bytes. So a client template, a numbered requirements list, a table of contents and a logo in the header survive a terminology pass without anyone having to check them. You review the changes, not the document.
A BA’s Thursday afternoon
The integrator returns the interface specification at 15:00 and it has to go back before the end of the day. Two things are wrong with it: the document says “client” where your glossary says “subscriber”, and half the requirements are written as intentions rather than testable statements. You have an agent for exactly that, its input set to Document and its output set to The edited file. Hit the shortcut, drop the .docx on the picker, glance at the credit estimate, run. Two minutes later the preview lists thirty-one changed paragraphs: you skim the highlighted stretches, spot one requirement where the rewrite changed the meaning, and fix that one by hand in the downloaded copy. The integrator’s template, their numbering and their diagrams come back exactly as they sent them. For the wording pass itself, see PRD polish, and for documents you only need to read rather than rewrite, see running AI actions on documents.
What it will not do to your document
An editor you cannot trust with a real deliverable is not worth the two minutes it saves.
It refuses rather than half-finishing
An empty document, a single paragraph longer than 5,000 characters, or a document longer than 150,000 characters stops the run with a clear message. Silently truncating a contract and calling it edited would be the worse answer.
Nothing to change means no file
If the agent comes back proposing only the wording that was already there, you get a "nothing to change" result instead of a new file to compare against the old one.
A file saved mid-run is not written over
If the document changes on disk while the agent is working, the write is refused. The edits are addressed by paragraph position, and a document that moved underneath them would take the right edits in the wrong places.
PDF limits are shown, not hidden
In a PDF, text is repainted into the space it occupied. Where that cannot be done faithfully, because the new text will not fit, because the background behind it is not one flat colour, or because a character cannot be drawn in the standard font, the spot is flagged in the preview rather than quietly approximated.
Where the document text goes
The paragraphs of the document are sent to the AI to be rewritten, and that is the only place they travel. They are not written into your Khint history, not added to a Memory session, and not synced to the cloud: the history row for the run records the file paths and how many paragraphs changed, so it can offer you a download button instead of a copy button. Delete that row, or clear your history, and the stored edited file goes with it. If you would rather strip identifiers before any AI call at all, the same per-agent PII redaction switch applies here as everywhere else.
Common questions
Which file formats come back edited?
Word (.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx), Excel (.xlsx) and PDF. The Office formats are rewritten directly on your machine: only the text you asked to change is replaced, and every other part of the package (styles, theme, images, headers) is copied through unchanged. A PDF stores positioned text rather than paragraphs, so it is handled differently: each edited line is repainted in place, and any spot where that cannot be done cleanly is flagged for you instead of being faked.
Does my original file get overwritten?
No. The source document is never opened for writing. Khint writes a new file next to your other Khint outputs, named after the original with an "(edited)" suffix, and a later run never overwrites an earlier result. From the preview window you can download a copy wherever you want it or reveal the file in Finder or Explorer.
What happens to formatting inside a paragraph I rewrite?
The unit Khint replaces is the text itself, not the paragraph's styling, so the paragraph keeps its own style, spacing and numbering. Inside a paragraph, a small fix touches only the stretch of characters that changed: a bold term or a link elsewhere in the same paragraph survives untouched. A full rewrite of a paragraph is the one case where intra-paragraph formatting is not preserved, since none of the original wording is left to attach it to.
Can a workflow end with an edited document?
Not today. A workflow can start from a document, and its steps can write to Jira, Confluence, Linear, Notion, Slack or Gmail, but giving back the edited file is something you set on an agent and get when you run that agent. If you want a workflow to act on a document, point its trigger at the file and let the steps produce text or an integration write.
Send back the document, not a draft
Free with 300 credits a month, about 10 AI actions a day. No credit card. Set one agent to give you the edited file and try it on the next specification that lands in your inbox.