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Show HN: Docx-CLI: agents read/edit Word docs using 1/2 the time and tokens(github.com)
48 points by kirillklimuk 5 hours ago | 20 comments
rnxrx 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This is great - and another example of how much more efficient CLI tool use ends up being in actual day-to-day use. Claude Code and Hermes took it in and it runs great in my initial tries at it. Thanks for making and sharing it!

felooboolooomba 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I know that the office suite format is a relic which is hard to get rid of. But I can't help feeling that in these new AI era, that we should focus on leaving that proprietary format behind.

It is one of the biggest facilitator of vendor lock in in the history of computing.

FailMore 41 minutes ago | parent [-]

Hey, I'm building something a bit like that - please checkout https://smalldocs.org if you have time.

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"

kirillklimuk 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I originally started this project just to build a TA agent for a professor who didn't have any TAs (my wife). So as you can imagine, it was critical that it could properly write comments and only edit with track edits mode on... and do all of this without accidentally breaking the structure of the doc that couldn't be read.

It's since then expanded to cover everything from editing tables, hyperlinks, footnotes, and a lot more. Now it's a pretty powerful tool that can trivially fill out a MNDA form, mark up a contract, author a poetry booklet, and fill out an invoice, which is now the eval suite where the numbers in the title come from.

You might be asking, "why did you do all of this?" Well, I'm building an agent harness for normies that are not gonna know what a token even is but just want their stuff not to take an epoch and a half to run. So I've got to make the tools be MUCH more optimal than they've even been.

I figure putting them out to the community and inviting all of you to help me might be a way to do that =).

librasteve an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

this is awesome - I wonder how this would combine with DSL tools like https://slangify.org

kirillklimuk an hour ago | parent [-]

honestly, worth a try! might be easier for the LLMs than authoring CLI commands.

firasd 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very cool. So much of the 'capability overhang' of AI can be addressed with tools like this--data manipulation etc without LLMs having to galaxy brain everything in token space

kirillklimuk 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, I agree. Working on something like this for PDFs.

simlevesque 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've done many custom low token output CLIs like this for my day job and it's something I expect to see much more of.

danielsmori 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nice — CLI-first for document tooling is underrated. How are you handling embedded images in the XML? That was a pain point when I was parsing OOXML in a different context.

kirillklimuk 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If the reader needs the images, there's an explicit extract command that gets them into a folder. If the writer needs to update them, there's and explicit replace command and insert commands for that purpose. It all has to go into the relationship files of course.

rubyfan 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I haven’t looked under the hood here but to make simple text replacement via command line is an LLM even required? A human driven command line tool to do basic substitution on batches of files reliably would be amazing.

BorisMelnik 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

there is a python library for docx handling. my thinking was the use case for this was for larger scale automations / document processing.

kirillklimuk 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not really - if you wanna do a text replacement you can extract it yourself and do some work (or just use this CLI). The library is designed for longer workloads.

asdff 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

sed, awk. docx is just zipped xml.

cyanydeez 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

you've never dealt with ooxml.

rubyfan an hour ago | parent [-]

Sadly I have spent lots of time with ooxml and pdf and my experience suggests there really aren’t reliable means for dealing with seemingly simple changes.

topaztee 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

nice to see others try to solve a problem we also experienced.

I'm also working on letting agents read/edit word docs but exposing it as a simple MCP

www.vespper.com

kirillklimuk 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That's pretty cool!

MoAz06 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I like it