Stop copy-pasting into ChatGPT: edit your Markdown in place with AI Assist
A practical walkthrough of using AI Assist in the Markdown Tidy editor — explain dense passages, beautify clunky prose, and transform selections with a custom instruction, all without leaving your document.
The copy-paste tax
Here's a workflow most of us do a dozen times a day without noticing: you're editing a document, a sentence isn't working, so you select it, switch tabs, paste it into a chatbot, type "make this clearer," wait, copy the answer, switch back, and paste it in - then fix the formatting the chatbot mangled on the way.
Every one of those tab switches is a small tax on your attention. AI Assist removes it. The AI is right there in the editor, working on the exact text you've highlighted, and it speaks Markdown natively. Here's how to actually use it.
1. Explain the parts you didn't write
You inherit a lot of Markdown you didn't author - a teammate's spec, an AI-generated summary, a config snippet from a Stack Overflow answer. When a passage is opaque, select it and hit Explain.
The explanation drops in as a blockquote right below the text:
> **Explanation:** This regex matches a semantic version string —
> three dot-separated numbers, with an optional pre-release suffix.Because it's inserted rather than replacing anything, you can leave the explanation in as a comment for the next reader, or delete it once it's done its job. It's a fast way to annotate a document for a less-technical audience, or just to check your own understanding before you ship.
2. Beautify the sentence you keep rewriting
Everyone has that one sentence they rewrite four times and still don't like. Select it and click Beautify. AI rewrites it for clarity, grammar and flow - keeping your meaning, your language and your voice - and inserts the polished version on the next line.
The "insert, don't overwrite" rule pays off here: you get to see the original and the rewrite side by side and pick the better one, instead of losing your draft to a rewrite you didn't ask for. Beautify is also good on a whole paragraph at once - tighten a rambling intro, smooth out notes you dictated, or clean up prose that came out of a transcript.
3. Transform anything with Apply
Apply is the open-ended one: select text, type an instruction, and AI does it. A few that come up constantly:
- "Turn this into a bulleted list." Paste a wall-of-text paragraph, select it, and get clean Markdown bullets.
- "Translate to French." Localise a section without leaving the doc. (Markdown Tidy handles multilingual content, so the output renders correctly everywhere.)
- "Make this more formal / friendlier / shorter." Shift the tone of a passage for a different audience.
- "Add a one-sentence summary above this section." Generate a TL;DR for a long block.
- "Rewrite this as a Markdown table." Restructure comparison-style prose into a table.
Because the result is inserted below your selection, Apply doubles as a scratchpad: generate a few variations, keep the one that works, delete the rest.
A realistic editing pass
Say you've pasted a ChatGPT answer into the editor - it's full of useful content but reads like a chatbot. A normal pass might look like:
- Clean it first (Markdown Tidy's core job) to strip the formatting artifacts.
- Beautify the opening paragraph so it doesn't start with "Certainly! Here's…".
- Apply "turn this into a numbered list" on a clump of run-on steps.
- Explain one technical aside for the non-engineers who'll read it.
- Export to PDF or DOCX - the AI-inserted text renders identically to everything else, because it goes through the same conversion engine.
You never left the tab.
Notes on cost and control
AI Assist runs on your account's credits. Explain and Beautify are billed by selection size (a credit per ~500 tokens, minimum one); Apply is a flat 3 credits and isn't charged if the model fails. A free account gets 50 credits a month - plenty to build the habit - and Premium includes 2,000. Long selections are trimmed server-side so a runaway paste can't burn through your balance.
And the rule worth repeating: AI Assist never overwrites your text. Every result is an addition you choose to keep. That's what makes it safe to reach for constantly instead of treating it as a big, scary "let the AI rewrite my document" button.
Open the editor, highlight something, and try one. Tell us what you'd want next - support@sudzy.co.
Related reading: Introducing AI Assist in the editor · The AI-generated Markdown cleanup checklist · Paste vs convert: two ways to use Markdown Tidy
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