livedocuments has an MCP server, so you can connect it to an AI tool you already use, like Claude, and then find, view, create, and edit your documents from inside that tool. Ask it for a slide deck on a topic, an article written up from your notes, or a tweak to an existing page, and the result is saved to your account.
You need an account
Connecting an AI tool is a signed-in-only feature, the same as API tokens and teams. The editor, sharing, and real-time collaboration stay account-free for guests, but driving your documents programmatically is an advanced, opt-in capability that needs an account.
Connecting
In your AI tool, add a connector (an MCP server) pointing at https://mcp.livedocuments.app/mcp. Connecting AI Tools has the steps for Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT and others. The first time, your tool opens a livedocuments page titled Connect followed by the tool's name (you'll sign in first if you aren't already). It says which site the access will be sent to: only continue if you recognise it. Choose Connect to approve, or Cancel.
Approving creates an API token behind the scenes and hands it to your tool. From then on the connection just works. The token is an ordinary API token: it appears with your other tokens on liveworkspace.app, named after the tool, and you can revoke it there any time to disconnect the tool. Like all tokens, it lasts six months; reconnecting the tool then creates a fresh one.
What the AI can do
The connection gives your AI tool these tools:
- Find documents: search your documents by name, across your personal library and the shared libraries of every team you belong to.
- Read a document: get a tab's contents as a text outline, and a picture of it when the AI asks for one.
- List templates: browse the same hand-tuned template library the editor's template starts offer.
- Create a document: turn a request into a new document, with one tab or several. A tab can start from a template: ask for "a slide deck" and the AI can lay down the ready-made pages, then fill in your content.
- Add a tab: add another tab (its own row of pages) to an existing document, for example a detail view of one part. Tabs can start from a template too.
- Update a document: rework a whole tab or make a small adjustment.
- Share a document: turn a document into a share link to hand to someone. Unless you ask for another level, the AI makes a Participant link: people can edit the text and comment, but not add, move or restyle anything.
- Rename a document and Delete a document: tidy your library from the AI tool, a whole document or a single tab. Deleting a document moves it to the Trash; deleting a tab removes it for good.
- List the Trash and Restore a document: bring back something deleted by mistake, by you or by the AI.
- Change pages and Write an article: make Pages pages. Ask for a deck and the AI adds slides, from the same slide layouts the page panel offers, then fills in their text; ask for an infographic and it lays one out. Ask it to write something up and it writes an article, in Markdown, which flows onto as many pages as it needs when you open it. It can also read an article back, edit it and write it again.
- Search icons and List images: find an icon by what it shows, and find a picture you uploaded to your image gallery, so the AI can put them on a page.
Beyond plain boxes and arrows, the AI can fill in sticky notes (in the sticky colours), tables, code blocks, bar, line, and pie charts, and Sankey diagrams (from a list of flows: what moves from where to where, and how much). Your AI tool may also surface a ready-made prompt ("Show my document") as a quick action, so you don't have to know the tool names.
When the AI changes a document you have open, you see it happen: the change arrives on your canvas straight away, outlined for a moment in your colour, and a note at the bottom says what changed. Show takes you to it and Undo puts it back (your own Undo shortcut only ever undoes your own edits). Anything you change at the same time is kept. To review or undo a change after its note has gone, see Reviewing and Undoing an Agent's Changes. An element someone else in the document has selected is off limits: a change that touches it is refused, and the AI is told to leave it out or try again later.
The AI does the thinking; livedocuments validates, lays out, saves, and renders what it produces. The MCP server runs no AI model of its own. New documents an AI creates land at the root of My Work (or your default folder, if you set one), each with a Made by AI badge; the Made by AI filter lists them all, wherever you file them.
What a connection can and can't touch
By default the token behind a connection has full read and write access to your documents, including the documents in your teams' shared libraries, so only connect tools you trust, and revoke the token if you stop using one. If you'd rather a tool could look but not change anything, switch on Read-only access on the approval page when you connect it: the connection can then find and read your documents (and list your Trash) but can't create, edit, share, rename, delete or restore anything. The block is enforced by our server, not just the tool. Its token shows a Read-only badge in the API Tokens list.
Either way, a connection can't manage your teams or your account: inviting members, changing roles, and deleting things other than documents stay with you, signed in. It can never delete a document for good either; that stays with you, in the Trash. (A tab it deletes is gone for good.)
Approving a connection creates a token, so it fails if you already have 20 tokens that haven't expired; revoke one on liveworkspace.app first. Some tools list each document tool twice, once under an older diagram name marked deprecated: they do the same thing.
Connected a tool you no longer use? Revoke its token on liveworkspace.app. livedocuments stops accepting it within a minute.
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