doc-control

Status: spec and plan approved — implementation starting. See status/specification.md and status/plan.md.

A deterministic tool that lets AI agents work on Word documents quickly, precisely and safely, ideally live in the Word window the writer has open. Every content change is a tracked change the writer can accept or reject.

For anyone — writers and editors first — who wants an AI agent's help inside a Word document without a single silent change. Nothing to install yet; watch the repo for the first release.

Planned shape

• One core, two engines, one API
  • File engine: edits a closed .docx with the Python standard library only, rewriting only the parts it touches.
  • Live engine: controls the open Word (Windows/COM first, Mac later).
• Two front doors: a CLI with JSON in/out, and an MCP server (doc-control mcp, stdio) for Claude Desktop / Cowork and other MCP clients.
• Safety first: lock-file and on-disk change detection, backup before every write, verification, automatic restore, operation log with undo, and unintended_changes == 0 as a gate.
• No AI inside. Judgment belongs to the agent; approval belongs to the writer.

It will replace docx-fixer, whose rules become packs built on this tool, and serve literary-critic as its first downstream consumer.

MCP server

doc-control mcp serves every operation as an MCP tool over stdio, one tool per operation (para.move becomes para_move), with the same JSON Schemas and the same response envelope as the CLI. It needs nothing beyond the package itself:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "doc-control": { "command": "uvx", "args": ["doc-control", "mcp"] }
  }
}

Documents

• Initial research: tooling and risks

Development

This repo uses claude-arsenal (spec-driven workflow, gated tasks in arsenal/tasks/). See CLAUDE.md.

Related projects

Same author:

• claude-arsenal — a Claude Code skill and plugin marketplace: specs before code, failing tests first, gates with numbers.
• literary-critic — lets an LLM index, analyse and advise on a full novel manuscript the way a professional editor would; doc-control's first planned consumer.
• drawspec — declarative diagram spec → clean, themeable SVG; JSON with no coordinates, so an LLM can write it.
• integral-job-search — a candidate-centred job search run as a conversation in Claude Code.

License

Apache-2.0