Choosing Your Approach
Situation | Best approach |
Specification is outdated or needs major restructuring | Rewrite with AI |
Specification is mostly solid but a few sections need work | Create Draft, then edit or regenerate individual sections |
You want to make a small wording change yourself | Create Draft, then edit the section directly |
Rewrite with AI regenerates every section of a published specification at once. It's the fastest path to a complete refresh, and it's the right call when a spec has fallen out of date, uses inconsistent language, or needs a structural overhaul.
Create Draft opens the specification for manual editing instead. Your existing content stays in place, and you decide what to change. This preserves language you want to keep while giving you full control over specific sections.
Both paths are available from the same place: open a published specification and look at the Rewrite with AI button. Click the dropdown arrow next to it to find Create Draft.
Note: Clicking Rewrite with AI opens a confirmation modal warning that your current draft content will be overwritten. If you've made manual edits you want to keep, click Create Draft instead, or finish reviewing those edits before starting a rewrite.
How Full AI Rewrites Work
When you click Rewrite with AI, Holly opens a modal where you provide instructions, then regenerates every section of the specification based on that input. This typically completes in 1–2 minutes.
For guidance on writing an effective rewrite prompt — what to include, sample prompts for common revision types, and tips for getting a focused result — see Rewriting an Existing Class Spec with AI.
Your previously published specification isn't lost. The rewrite creates a new draft, and the published version remains available in the History tab. That said, "preserved" only covers the published version. If you had unsaved manual edits in progress when you clicked Rewrite with AI, those aren't recoverable through Show Edits, which compares your draft against the last published version, not against whatever you'd typed in just before the rewrite ran. Undo (covered below) is your way back to that in-progress work.
Manual Editing: Preserve Good Content, Fix Specific Issues
Select Create Draft from the dropdown menu when you want to make specific changes while keeping most of the existing content.
Click the dropdown arrow next to Rewrite with AI.
Select Create Draft.
Click on any section to open the text editor.
Make changes directly, the same way you would in any word processor.
Holly saves your changes automatically as you work.
Regenerating Specific Sections with AI
Whether you're editing manually or reviewing the results of a full rewrite, you can regenerate individual sections without redoing the entire specification. This is the best option when one or two sections need work but the rest of the spec is in good shape.
While editing your draft, click the regenerate icon (circular arrow) next to the section you want to improve.
Describe what you want to change in the text field — for example, "add a bilingual requirement" or "suggest a more senior title."
Click Regenerate.
Wait for the section to update, typically 30 seconds or less. The editor locks during regeneration, so don't close the tab. If you need to keep working elsewhere, open a new tab.
Review the suggested content and check the change indicator below it for an explanation of what changed and why.
Tip: Holly surfaces a curated set of clickable suggested prompts when you open the regeneration field, so you don't have to start from a blank box. Pick one as a starting point and edit it to fit your specific change.
Context-aware regeneration: The AI considers the current content of every other section when regenerating one. If you've already updated the Duties section to reflect more senior responsibilities, regenerating the Definition or Title will factor in that change to keep the specification internally consistent.
Understanding Change Indicators
After a section is edited or regenerated, Holly displays a change indicator badge — for example, "Content Revision" — on that section. Click the badge to see what changed and why it improves the specification.
Example: After regenerating a Definition section, you might see a badge explaining that the content was condensed into four sentences focused on role purpose, primary duties, rotation opportunities, and collaboration, with a note on how this improves readability for applicants.
Use change indicators to quickly identify which sections have been modified, understand the reasoning behind a change before reviewing the content itself, and track your progress as you work through a draft.
Undoing a Rewrite or Edit
If you don't like the result of a rewrite or regeneration, you don't have to start over.
Full rewrite: Press Ctrl+Z (or Cmd+Z on Mac) or use the undo button in the editor toolbar to revert the entire rewrite in a single step. After a rewrite completes, a persistent notification with an Undo button also appears — it stays onscreen until you click Undo or navigate away, so you won't lose the option by accident.
Section regeneration: The same undo controls work for individual section regenerations.
Multiple rewrites in a row: Each rewrite counts as its own undo step. If you run two rewrites back to back, undoing once reverts the second; undoing again reverts the first.
Starting over completely: If you'd rather abandon the draft altogether, you can discard it to return to the last published version. This is a separate option from undo, and it's the right choice if you want to fully reset rather than step back incrementally.
Saving Your Work
Holly saves your work automatically so you don't lose progress while editing.
Auto-save: Changes save every few seconds as you work.
Draft status: Everything stays in draft until you submit it for approval.
Version history: Holly keeps previous versions so you can revert if needed.
What gets saved includes all manual edits, AI regeneration results you've accepted, status changes, and your modification history.