Kenny Document Assistant

Overview

Kenny built into the document and task editors. Instead of answering in a side panel, the Document Assistant writes directly into the content you’re editing. Ask it to draft a section, rewrite a selection, or fill in a task description and watch the text stream into place. You can accept or reject the changes before they save.

Use it for: drafting task descriptions, rewriting selected paragraphs, expanding bullet points into prose, summarising a long document, writing acceptance criteria.

How it works

  1. You open a knowledge document or a new task and trigger Ask Kenny.
  2. A small input panel appears at the bottom of the editor.
  3. You type the request. If you had text selected, Kenny rewrites that selection; otherwise Kenny writes at the cursor or replaces the whole document, depending on what you ask for.
  4. Kenny streams the result straight into the editor as a preview. While streaming, the send button changes to a Stop button — click it to cancel the generation and keep any partial content that has already been written. You can still Accept or Reject what Kenny produced so far.
  5. Once the result is complete, an Accept button appears. Click it to apply the change and autosave, or Reject to roll back to the previous version.

Triggers & shortcuts

Action How
Open Ask Kenny in a knowledge document Cmd+J (Mac) / Ctrl+J (Windows, Linux)
Open Ask Kenny in a task description Cmd+J or the Ask Kenny button under the task title
Slash command inside a document or task description Type /kenny
Generate a task description from the title Type /ai in the description field of a new task
Insert a newline in the input Shift+Enter
Stop a streaming response Click the Stop button (replaces Send while streaming)
Dismiss the panel after a response Press Enter on an empty input
Close the panel Esc or the close button
Apply streamed changes Accept button below the preview
Discard streamed changes Reject button below the preview

Setup

Available to every workspace member once your workspace admin has enabled an AI provider in Workspace settings. No per-user setup is required.

Workspace owners can also customise how Kenny appears across the workspace — pick one of several preset avatars or upload a custom image — from the Kenny section of Workspace settings. The selected avatar replaces the default sparkle icon wherever Kenny shows up, including the Ask Kenny panel in documents and tasks.

Usage

Draft a task description from the title. Create a new task, type a title, then in the description field type /ai. Kenny drafts a description based on the title without waiting for more input.

Rewrite a selection. Select a paragraph in a knowledge document, press Cmd+J, and ask “make this more concise” or “turn this into a bullet list”. Kenny replaces the selection with the rewrite.

Draft a new section at the cursor. Place the cursor where you want new content, press Cmd+J, and describe what you want. Kenny inserts the draft at that spot.

Reference other items. Inside the Kenny input you can mention tasks, documents, folders, projects, and team members the same way you do elsewhere in Kanvas AI. Mentioning a folder lets Kenny see the documents inside it so it can pick the most relevant one before writing.

Reference linked code. When the project has a connected GitHub repository, Kenny can browse files, read pull request diffs, search code, view commit history, and compare branches — directly from the editor. Ask Kenny to “summarise what changed in the last PR” or “draft release notes from recent commits” and it pulls the relevant code context automatically, scoped to the project’s linked repositories.

Iterate until it’s right. Reject a draft you don’t like, tweak the prompt, and run it again. The assistant keeps the current conversation for the editor so follow-up prompts build on what came before.

Follows your memory. Drafts and rewrites honour the same memory layers as the rest of Kenny: your personal About you memory, the shared Workspace memory a workspace owner can author from Workspace settings, and the About project memory of the project the document or task belongs to. Use them to bake in voice, formatting preferences, and house style so you don’t have to repeat them in every prompt.

Edge cases & limits

  • Selection preservation. If you had a block selected when you opened the panel, the selection stays highlighted so you don’t lose track of it while typing a prompt.
  • Accept or reject before leaving. Closing the panel without choosing Accept or Reject keeps the draft in a preview state until you decide.
  • Attachments. PDFs attached to a task are readable by Kenny up to a conservative text-extraction cap per file; very large PDFs are truncated.
  • Folder mention expansion. When you mention a folder in a prompt, Kenny sees the list of documents inside it and can load any of them on demand.
  • Provider not configured. If your workspace admin has not enabled an AI provider, the panel opens in a disabled state and points to admin settings.
  • Input auto-expands. The prompt input starts at one line and grows up to five lines as you type. Beyond five lines it scrolls, so longer prompts never obscure the editor.
  • Dismissing the panel. After Kenny finishes responding, pressing Enter on an empty input closes the panel. You can also press Esc or click the close button at any time.
  • Scope. The Document Assistant edits only the current document or task. To run actions across the workspace (creating tasks, drafting new documents elsewhere), use the Kenny Chat Drawer or Kenny Research.
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