Make every AI edit land as a draft for review

MaintenanceIntermediate~10 min

Before you start

A connected site with content reads on and the create-draft write ability enabled. Publishing stays a human step, so the agent never needs a publish capability for this.

The safest agent workflow is the one where nothing the agent does is final. Instead of letting it publish and then hoping you catch the mistakes, you flip the order: the agent proposes, in a form you can see, and a human decides what actually goes live.

This is less a single task than a habit you hand your agent. New work arrives as a draft, never published. Changes to existing posts arrive with their revision trail attached, so you can read the exact before-and-after before you keep them. The only write in the whole pattern is a draft, which is a proposal by design.

The prompt
From now on, work draft-first on this site. When I ask you to write
something new, create it as a draft, never published, and hand me the
draft ID with a short summary of what you wrote so I can open it and
publish it myself. When I ask you to change an existing post, after the
edit list the revisions on that post and show me the specific revision
so I can see exactly what changed before I keep it. Do not publish
anything, and do not roll back on your own. You draft and show your
work; I decide what goes live.

Why this is safe to run

The one write here is create-draft, and a draft is not a published page. It sits in the same holding area a human writer’s unfinished work sits in, invisible to visitors until someone with a publish capability decides to ship it. The agent does not hold that capability in this workflow, so it structurally cannot cross the line from proposing to publishing.

The review half is entirely reads. list-revisions shows the history of a post as metadata only, and get-revision pulls the body of any one revision with an optional diff against what is live now. That means every change the agent makes to existing content leaves a paper trail you can open and read, and the decision to keep or discard stays with you at the post’s own Revisions screen. Draft in, review, publish by hand: the agent never gets the last word.

Already connected? Skip the paste. Ask your agent to adopt the “draft-first change-review” habit, or just tell it to draft and never publish, and it works this way on your own site.

How it works

  1. Ask the agent to write new content as a draft, never published.
  2. Have it hand you the draft ID and a summary of what it wrote.
  3. For anything it edited, have it list the revisions on that post.
  4. Read a specific revision to see the exact before-and-after.
  5. You publish or roll back by hand once you are satisfied.

Questions

Does the agent ever publish on its own here?
No. create-draft can only create a draft; publishing is a separate ability with its own capability gate. The agent drafts, you publish, so nothing goes live without a person deciding.
How do I undo an edit I don't like?
Every post edit leaves a revision. list-revisions shows the history and get-revision shows the content of any one, with an optional diff against the current version, so you can see exactly what changed. If you want to roll it back, you do that from the post's Revisions screen in WordPress.