What an AI Should Never Be Allowed to Do to Your Page
The risk with an assistant that edits your live page isn't a bad suggestion, it's a confident one you can't take back. Here are the limits worth demanding before you let anything near a page people actually visit.
Ask a language model to shorten one heading on a page of twenty three blocks and there is a good chance it hands back seven. The heading will be correct. The products, the booking block and the form will simply be absent, because a model answering about one item in a long list has no particular reason to repeat the other twenty two back to you.
That is not a flaw anybody can prompt their way out of, and it is worth starting there, because the interesting question about AI editing is not how good the suggestions are. It is what the tool around the model does on the day one of them is wrong.
It should edit a draft, never the page people are looking at
The first limit is the boring one and it does more work than the rest combined. An assistant should change a draft you are looking at, and your visitors should keep seeing the page you last published until you decide otherwise.
That single boundary turns every category of mistake into an inconvenience. A misread instruction is something you look at and discard. Without it, a misread instruction is something a customer reads.
One press should take back the whole edit
If an assistant makes six changes and you dislike the result, undo should return you to exactly where you were, in one step, and should not also take back the twenty minutes of work you did before you asked.
That sounds obvious and it is easy to get wrong. The natural way to apply a generated document is to load it as fresh state, which also clears the history, so the way back from a bad suggestion becomes the way back from everything. The right behaviour is for the edit to be one step in the same history as your own typing.
It should not be able to invent a price
An assistant writing product copy can write anything, including a number. If it can type a price, it can type the wrong one, and the wrong one sits on a page in front of buyers.
The way out is to make it impossible rather than unlikely. When the assistant puts one of your products on the page, it names which product, and the title and the price are read from your own record. Whatever it wrote in that field is replaced by what you actually charge. It cannot point a Buy button at something you never created either, which is what stops a plausible-looking checkout leading nowhere.
What it forgets should stay where it is
Back to the seven blocks out of twenty three, because this is where that gets decided.
If a missing block means “delete it”, that reply takes sixteen things off the page. If a missing block means “leave it alone”, the very same reply is exactly right. So omission has to mean unchanged, and removal has to be something the assistant states explicitly, block by block. Get that boundary the right way round and the worst case of a lazy answer is that nothing happens, which is a fine worst case.
The record of what changed should not come from the assistant
This is the one people overlook. An assistant that edits your page will also tell you what it did, and it is describing its own work from memory. Ask for a booking block for a service you do not offer and you can get a cheerful “added a booking block for your tarot readings” over a page where nothing was added at all.
So the summary is the caption, and the list under it is the record: worked out by comparing the page before and after, so it reports what happened rather than what was intended. When the two disagree, and occasionally they will, the list is the one telling the truth. If nothing changed, it says nothing changed, whatever the sentence above it claims.
Why this is worth asking about
Every tool in this category will show you a demo where the suggestion is good. That is the easy half, and it is getting easier every month.
The half that decides whether you can leave it switched on is what the tool does with a bad answer: whether it reached your visitors, whether you can get back, whether the number on the page is yours, and whether you can tell what it actually did. Those are all product decisions, taken before the model is involved, and they are fair to ask about before you give anything edit access to a page you rely on.