Quick Ask

Quick Ask is the Quick Ask (AI) button in the toolbar of VitNode's rich text editor. It rewrites the selected text or writes more of it, streams the answer into a preview, and changes nothing until the editor applies it. It is built into Core and switched off for everyone except root roles until an admin allows it.

Before you beginCopy Anchor Link

• A language model with the text and streaming capabilities in ai.models. Quick Ask always streams, so without a streaming model it fails with AI_MODEL_INCOMPATIBLE. See AI setup.
• A model with pricing if the roles you allow have a points allowance. See Model pricing.
• An admin with ai:can_manage to change a role's AI access.

Turn on Quick Ask for a roleCopy Anchor Link

Check the resultCopy Anchor Link

Sign in with a member of that role and open any form with a rich text field, such as an article in the AdminCP. The toolbar shows Quick Ask (AI). Select a sentence, open Quick Ask and choose Shorten. The shorter text streams into a preview with Replace selection and Insert below. The run appears in Debug Panel → AI logs as @vitnode/core:editor.selection.rewrite.

What it can doCopy Anchor Link

An admin can switch either action off, or give it its own model, on Artificial Intelligence (AI) → Actions.

How it behavesCopy Anchor Link

• Bounded context. It sends the selection (up to 8,000 characters) and up to 1,500 characters before and after it, never the whole document.
• Cost shown first. With a selection, the panel shows the reservation bound, not a price: "One request costs at most N AI points - usually much less."
• Stop is cheap. Stop cancels the stream. Stopping before any text arrives charges nothing; stopping after text has streamed in counts as a run.
• Plain text only. The answer becomes paragraphs and hard breaks. The editor never parses it as HTML, so it cannot inject markup, links or scripts.
• Stale selection. If the selected text changed while the answer was written, Replace selection is disabled and Insert below still works.
• One-step undo. Applying is one editor transaction. The toast's Undo or Ctrl+Z restores the text exactly.
• Nothing is saved until you save the form.
• Content language. It writes in the language of the field being edited (the multi-language tab), not the interface language.

Quick Ask calls Core's AdminCP stream routes on /admin pages and the member routes everywhere else. See Streaming.

Build your own editor toolCopy Anchor Link

Your own Tiptap tools can reuse the same pieces:

• streamAiAction() and estimateAiAction() from @vitnode/core/lib/ai/stream-client run and price a text action. See Streaming.
• From @vitnode/core/components/tiptap/quick-ask/quick-ask-editor: takeQuickAskSnapshot(editor) captures the selection with its context ({ before, selection, after, from, to }), isQuickAskStale(editor, snapshot) tells whether the selection changed since, and applyQuickAskResult(editor, { from, to, mode, text }) inserts the answer as one undoable transaction, with mode "replace" or "below".

import { streamAiAction } from '@vitnode/core/lib/ai/stream-client'

await streamAiAction({
  action: '@vitnode/core:editor.selection.rewrite',
  input: { after, before, locale, operation: 'shorten', selection },
  onDelta: (delta) => setPreview((text) => text + delta),
  scope: 'admin',
})

before, selection and after come from takeQuickAskSnapshot(editor), locale is the content language being edited, and setPreview is your component's state setter.