Show HN: Docx-CLI: agents read/edit Word docs using 1/2 the time and tokens (github.com)

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 =).

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

I like it

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.

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.

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

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.

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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.

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

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!

There have been a few similar posts on HN recently for working with MS Office docs:

https://github.com/iOfficeAI/OfficeCLI

https://github.com/rcarmo/python-office-mcp-server

https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs

It would be great to see some benchmarks for token use, correctness, features etc.

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For A while I was expecting that MCP will dominate, but we seem to be going in the direction of CLI being more prevalent. Can’t wrap my mind around it.

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Is there a generalizable approach that you have found for finding ways to be more efficient with the models, or is it case-by-case?