Gemini

Verified against Gemini Canvas · 2026-03-25

Draft and refine a document live inside Gemini's canvas without losing earlier edits

A workflow prompt for Gemini's canvas-style collaborative document editor that scopes every revision request to a targeted diff, instead of a full regeneration that quietly discards prior edits.

Gemini CanvasGemini app

The prompt

Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.

Open a canvas and draft a one-page internal proposal about switching our team from weekly status meetings to async written updates, targeted at my manager and two peer team leads, roughly under 500 words.

Structure it as: problem, proposed change, tradeoffs, what we will measure after 30 days

Once you've drafted it, wait for my edit requests. For every edit request I give you after this:
1. Change only the section or sentence I point to — leave every other paragraph exactly as it is unless I say otherwise.
2. Show me what changed in that section; don't restate the whole document as if everything moved.
3. If my edit request would create a conflict with something stated elsewhere in the doc (a number, a claim, a name), flag the conflict before applying the edit rather than silently creating an inconsistent document.
4. Keep a one-line running note at the bottom titled "Open questions" for anything flagged as unresolved — remove items from it only when I confirm they're resolved.

First draft only — don't add the "Open questions" note until there's actually something unresolved.
Customize the highlighted detailsoptional — the prompt above already works

Why this works

Canvas is a persistent, directly editable document object rather than a fresh chat reply each turn, which is precisely what makes the scoped-edit rule necessary: the common canvas failure mode is a 'revise this paragraph' request triggering a full regeneration of the document that silently overwrites hand-edits you made directly in the canvas since the last turn. Scoping every edit to the section pointed at, and showing only what changed, keeps the document's edit history legible instead of forcing you to diff the whole thing after every request. The conflict-flagging rule catches a specific cross-reference problem — a number or claim changed in one place but still quoted elsewhere in the doc — that a full-document regeneration would typically paper over by just rewriting both instances inconsistently or, worse, only one of them.

Verified against

Gemini Canvas Gemini 3 Pro · 2026-03-25

Changelog

  • 2026-03-25 Initial publish, verified against Gemini Canvas on Gemini 3 Pro.

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