[FailMore]

I went in the opposite direction and built https://smalldocs.org/, which is an office suite AI agents (and humans - including SWEs!) like to use.

I say it’s as if “Claude Code & Microsoft Office had a baby...”

Code available: https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs

Discord: https://discord.gg/txjATTsDaq

Sample document: https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc

Invoked via Claude Code by saying stuff like: “sdoc me the plan for this feature”, or “dig into our logs and sdoc me a report on our latency”

[wonderwallaus]

I find it so amusing that small dev's get it so right, yeh a trillion dollar company can't figure out what copilot is to their ecosystem.

[FailMore]

Thanks!

[maxloh]

> Elastic License 2.0. The source is public and you may use, copy, modify, and redistribute it. You may not offer SmallDocs to third parties as a hosted or managed service, strip its licensing notices, or circumvent its license-key functionality.

It is not open source unfortunately.

[FailMore]

I posted the same thing below, but I’m open for feedback on the license. I’ve put a lot of work in and I think there is a commercial pathway forward for the product. I don’t want to let someone else - who might be more experienced re commercialisation - take everything I’ve done and build a business with it (I’d really like to do that myself), so wasn’t sure what license to use as MIT didn’t feel right to me at the moment. But open for feedback/maybe I’m being too short sighted…

[Semaphor]

Personally, I like the elastic (and similar) license… as long as, as you did, it’s chosen upfront. Being open source as a marketing strategy and later switching to source available licenses is what I find highly [0] problematic.

[0]: With a bit of an understandable carve out if it turns out no one else ever contributed anything of significance.

[tchalla]

I don’t see why your license should be open source. It’s alright what you have.

[8cvor6j844qw_d6]

> so wasn’t sure what license to use as MIT didn’t feel right to me at the moment

You're onto the right track if you have plans for commercialisation.

Thanks for building this, I've tested it out and it's useful.

[philips]

This is really neat! I have been thinking about similar problems.

Is there a way to collaborate with multiple agents or people on the same doc? It is unclear to me.

[FailMore]

Multiple agents could write to the doc locally, but for the moment it’s not predominantly could based (only short links). I think I will build a cloud first version/offering/config soon

[anduril22]

This is super cool - so many uses. Does it work well with Excel formulae?

[FailMore]

Yep, it does. If you open https://smalldocs.org/s/tUWdfKLKBcnhnrYsoFMn4W#k=7SC6KGg-Fye... And scroll to the business model area, you’ll see it supports multi tab functionality + connected formulas.

[lelanthran]

This looks neat, but I don't see any examples of the format on the webpage (And no, I am not going to install Node.js just to see examples of the format).

[FailMore]

Does this link not work? https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc

If you’re talking about the README, you are right, but I think the homepage has a lot of examples you can click: https://smalldocs.org/#learn

[lelanthran]

I don't see a description of the format in that.

What does a human write to (for example) create the diagram mentioned in "A diagram, drawn from a description rather than dragged into place."?

To me this looks like AI-writes-everything and human-reads-everything.

[FailMore]

It is mostly that pattern yes, but you can see the underlying formats in https://smalldocs.org/docs

[lelanthran]

Right, thanks.

I looked at the format. I think you're mostly on the right track, but I also think that a better candidate might be to simply use (and augment, where necessary, such as for styles) the org mode format: It can do all the stuff you have, but also things like checkboxes, calendars, and more.

As a bonus, both people and agents already know the format so there is no need to have a skills file. For example, the following prompt on Gemini WebChat (hardly a good model):

    Give me an org mode file to show a PERT (Project evaluation and Review Technique) diagram, with a calendar below the diagram allowing me to see the current year. Create a hierarchy of tasks that have to be done using  checkboxes and collapsible sections to mark tasks/subtasks as done. Below that, give me a table of all the terminal tasks that need to be completed with task/subtask name, starting date, estimated ending date and the resource assigned to it.

    Finally, at the end, produce a gantt chart as a mermaid diagram for the sample project.

Produced a working file with tables[1], diagrams, calendar, checkboxes in a single file that Emacs rendered properly. Org mode can export to every format I ever needed (LaTeX, html, pdf). I once even had the resulting HTML conversion contain animations written in Javascript :-)

Maybe all you need to code for agents to write is a web-based viewer for Org Mode syntax?

Look at it this way: right now if I wanted what smalldocs does (i.e. ask the agent to generate any of your examples), I can ask the agent "do $FOO, generate org mode", and without a single additional skill/claude.md/agents.md file, get exactly the result you got from smalldocs.

I think maybe testdrive Emacs daily for a month; it would open your mind to the possibilities available[2]. If anything more is needed (like I wanted to put in JS in the HTML output), it can do it. If Emacs cannot do it, my agent can write an EmacsLisp function that will do it.

At the end of the day, when even a poor LLM can do what smalldocs does but without any additional .md files or context, I think maybe your solution might be over-engineered.

----------

[1] Org mode tables work exactly like spreadsheets, in that they can contain formulas.

[2] Think of it this way - when I needed multimodal documents, because I already knew Emacs, I just used that. When you needed multimodal documents, you vibed a whole new product into existence.

[philips]

I have been thinking about the problem of collaborating with AI in spreadsheets a bit. I think I want a few things solved:

- Revision control with attribution so I can double check LLMs edits

- Online collaboration with other humans and LLMs

- Schema and validation of column and row data

- Excel and Gdocs interoperability

One path I think you could go to accomplish this would be DuckDB which creates a programming interface that LLMs could use and interoperability with Excel and Google Docs via plugins.

Not sure if it is better to create from scratch rebuilds of the spreadsheet UX or rely on existing spreadsheet apps for that.

All that being said for any work I do I think I would want my data an LLM is operating on to be more structured and constrained than a text file or even a spreadsheet without cell validation.

[keithnz]

I built some scripts to do something similar but all local. It also live updates the document so you can see changes come through. Super useful

[nimonian]

Neat! I think agents making Word docs and PowerPoints is going to go away. I think something like small docs is the future.

[SoftTalker]

I don't think the corporate world is moving away from Word and PowerPoint anytime soon.

[FailMore]

Thanks very much! That is exactly my view too.

It’s also nice to get out of the command line for doing deep reading.

I have had a few developers try it, and some small number of them use it week after week (as do I): https://smalldocs.org/analytics

[etothet]

Great job on this. I can see this being extremely useful for my teams!

[FailMore]

Thanks, please could you email me at [e-mail]. I’m trying to learn how to make this a better experience for teams, so would love to work with you guys to optimise the experience.

[dumbmachine]

This is so cool! Loved your agent instruction snippet too.

[Zambyte]

Notably the posted project is Apache licensed, and your project is Elastic licensed. Your project looks cool and you've clearly put a lot of thought into making it useful, but the license makes it a non-starter for me.

[FailMore]

I’m open for feedback on the license. As you say/notice, I’ve put a lot of work in and I think there is a commercial pathway forward for the product. I don’t want to let someone else - who might be more experienced - take everything I’ve done and build a business with it (I’d really like to do that myself), so wasn’t sure what license to use as MIT didn’t feel right to me at the moment. But open for feedback/maybe I’m being too short sighted…