Watch it work
The board updates live while your agent writes: cards appear, connect, and fill in with no refresh. A presence chip names the agent, and a labeled cursor moves to whatever it's touching, described in plain verbs: editing a card, reading the board, attaching an asset. So at any moment you can see exactly what your agent is working on.
And for everything you didn't watch happen, the activity log (Activity, in the board rail) keeps the history: every card written, moved, linked, or approved, and by whom.
Review a card
Click a card to open the drawer. Everything you need to judge it is in one place:
- The rendered preview: an email shows as the email rather than raw HTML; markdown renders as prose.
- Citations: the sources the agent actually used, as clickable links. A research card that cites nothing deserves your suspicion.
- Provenance: who made this, whether you, a teammate, or the agent. The server records it, so it can't be faked.
- Version history: every meaningful edit, with what changed between versions.
For the fastest pass, don't open the drawer at all: flip deliverable cards right on the canvas. An email card flips over to the rendered email, so you can skim a whole phase of drafts in a minute.
Steer with comments
Right-click a card or a phase and choose Add comment. Comments are your asynchronous instructions to the agent. Leave five of them on the board at 9pm; the agent picks them up in its next session, does the work, and resolves each one. You skip the meeting, the re-briefing, and the scroll back through a chat to find what you asked for.
The agent never leaves comments of its own. That's by design: comments stay your voice, so an open comment always means "a human wants something changed here."
Check the open comments on my "Summer sale" board in Plainpaper; they're my instructions. Make the changes each one asks for, resolve it when you're done, and if any comment is unclear, ask me instead of guessing.
Use statuses to talk
Every card carries a status: draft awaiting approval approved live and onward. Use that line as a channel. Ask the agent to set finished drafts to awaiting approval, and the board itself becomes your review queue: anything wearing that chip is waiting on you, and the rest doesn't need your eyes yet.
Approve what's ready in the drawer, or simply tell the agent to approve it for you; the gate checks the same things either way. A card with an unfilled image placeholder can't be approved, a creative has to be staged in at least one mockup, and an ad needs its CTA and destination URL. "Approved" always means the artifact is actually complete. The full rules live in Approvals & control.
Walk me through everything awaiting my review on my "Summer sale" board in Plainpaper: every card set to awaiting approval and every pending action. For each one, give me the one-line summary and what decision you need from me.
Decide on actions
When work is about to leave Plainpaper (an email handed to your ESP, a creative pushed toward an ad platform), it shows up on the board as a pending action. Open it and the decision drawer shows the full chain that produced the thing: the artifact itself, the audience it targets, the insight that informed it, all resolved through the board's connections. You approve or reject with the reasoning in view, so the decision rests on more than a filename.
Approving is not sending. Plainpaper never sends emails or posts ads and never holds your platform logins. Your approval releases the work; your agent executes it through each platform's own connection.
Editing together is safe
Plainpaper treats a human and an agent editing the same board at the same time as the normal case. While someone is editing a card you'll see a soft in-use indicator: a nudge, not a hard lock. Simultaneous edits never silently overwrite each other: if two writers touch the same card, the later one is told the card moved on and re-reads before writing again, so your edit is never destroyed by an agent that was looking at an old copy.
If something does end up wrong, version history has your back: open the card, see what changed, and restore what you meant.
What changed on my "Summer sale" board since yesterday? Read the board and the version history of anything edited recently, and give me a short list: what was added, what was edited, what moved status, and what's still waiting on me.
Reviewing done, campaign approved? Next up: how a completely fresh session picks the work back up, in Resume a campaign.