The markdown editor
Edit, Preview and Changes — three tabs, no modes to learn.
Edit is a full code editor with the niceties you expect. Preview renders the document, including LaTeX maths, so an equation reads as an equation. Changes is a side-by-side diff of your buffer against the last save — it is how you check what an AI edit actually did before committing to it.
The Changes tab pulses briefly every time an AI edit lands, drawing your eye to the diff without a modal interrupting you. Opening a markdown file collapses the file strip so prose gets the width it deserves.
Where Project → any .md fileeditorwriting
Inline edit verbs
Select a sentence, pick a verb, get it back rewritten in a few seconds.
Clarify untangles a sentence that is doing too much. Tighten cuts it down. Grammar fixes it without rewriting your voice. All three work on a selection and return in seconds rather than minutes.
Check refs runs across the whole document and flags citation problems — a reference in the text with nothing in the list, a claim leaning on a citation that does not support it.
They return in seconds, which is what makes them usable for the twenty times an hour you would otherwise sit and fiddle with a sentence yourself.
Selection verbs need Edit mode. Add refs and Review doc work from any mode, because they do not touch your buffer.
| Verb | Works on | Result goes to |
|---|
| Clarify | The selection | The selection, staged in your editor |
|---|
| Tighten | The selection | The selection, staged in your editor |
|---|
| Grammar | The selection | The selection, staged in your editor |
|---|
| Check refs | The whole document | The document, staged in your editor |
|---|
| Add refs | The file on disk | The same file, edited in place |
|---|
| Review doc | The file on disk | A new file in Reviews |
|---|
- Select text in Edit mode.
- Pick a verb from the toolbar that appears over the selection.
- Review it in Changes, or
Cmd+Z to revert the whole edit in one stroke.
Where Editor → selection toolbareditoragentwriting
Edits that cannot clobber you
If you kept typing while the agent was thinking, the edit is discarded rather than applied over your work.
Before an AI edit is spliced in, Bench re-reads the exact range it was working on and compares it to what was sent. If the text moved because you carried on writing, the edit is dropped with an inline notice instead of overwriting what you just typed.
There is a second guard on size: a wildly oversized response to a small selection is rejected rather than pasted into your document. Both of these are invisible when everything is normal, which is the point.
Where Editoreditorsafety
Add references
Hands the manuscript to the agent to find and insert the citations it is missing.
Unlike the selection verbs, this one works on the file on disk and edits it in place — it is a background job with a pill, not a two-second round trip. The feed entry it produces points you back at the manuscript itself rather than at a log about the manuscript.
Where Editor → Add refseditorliteraturewriting
Review doc — propose and accept
Concrete, acceptable suggestions in a drawer, not a flat write-up you have to re-apply by hand.
Drop-in fixes show your original text beside a proposed replacement with one-click Accept or Dismiss. Broader structural feedback — this section argues two things at once, this claim needs a control — stays as advisory comments you read rather than apply.
Accepting stages the edit in your editor: one Cmd+Z undoes it, and it writes to disk only when you save. Review works on markdown, PDF and Word documents through the same shared toolbar, and its output is also written to the project's Reviews folder so the critique becomes part of the record.
Where Editor / document viewer → Revieweditoragentreview
Draft Text
Commission a piece of writing — locally, or in the cloud if it is going to take a while.
Point it at what you want written and what it should draw on. Output lands in the project's Drafts folder as a normal file. Long or heavy drafting can be sent to the cloud so you can close the laptop; see Data & analysis.
Where Project → Draft Textwritingagentcloud
Notes on a document
Annotate a passage or leave a free-standing note, and keep them as one list.
Notes on a document are editable cards: quoted, anchored to a selection you highlighted, or free-form. They sit beside the document rather than inside it, so the source file stays clean, and ARC can read them when you ask it about the document.
Where Document viewer → notes paneeditorreviewnotes
PDFs and Word documents
Read, annotate and review a paper or a collaborator's draft without leaving the project.
PDFs open with a thumbnail rail for navigation; Word documents render properly rather than as a download prompt. Both share the same toolbar as the markdown editor, and both support Review doc and document notes — so a reviewer's Word file and your own markdown draft are handled the same way.
Where Project → any .pdf / .docxdocumentsliterature
When a file changes underneath you
An amber banner, and a choice: Accept or Keep mine.
If a file is modified on disk while you have it open — by the agent, by a sync, by another application — Bench does not silently reload and does not silently overwrite. It tells you, shows you the difference, and asks which version wins.
Where Editoreditorsafety
Presentations
Slides authored as text, presented full-screen, kept inside the project.
Lab meeting decks written as structured text rather than dragged into place: themes, a slide editor, a navigator, and a full-screen presenter. Author them by hand or ask ARC to build one from a result you just produced.
Because they are files in the project, the deck you presented sits next to the analysis it presented.
Where Project → Presentationspresentationswriting
Chemical structures inside your writing
A smiles fenced block renders as a drawn molecule in Preview.
A protocol or draft can carry the structure itself rather than a description of it. The text you wrote is kept underneath the drawing, so the file is still plain markdown to everything else. See Data & analysis for the rest of the chemistry surface.
Where Editor → Previewchemistrywriting
