Dan Shipper

So collaborative documents are, um,

They're effectively a solved problem.

There's a couple of open source, well-known open source libraries that make doing collaborative documents fairly easy, or it can be fairly easy.

And so I obviously, like, I knew about those things, and I asked Codex to use their, the stack I use is YJS and Hocus Pocus.

YJS is this, like, underlying, like, library for collaborative documents, and Hocus Pocus is, like, a wrapper around it.

And I asked it to use that, and it did, and it was working, and what...

happened was as it as it was working it hadn't really read all of the like yjs hocus pocus best practices um

And there are a couple things you need to do at the very start of your project and a couple ways of thinking about how data should flow and who gets to write data when, for example.

Because it gets very complicated when you have someone typing over here and someone typing over here and an agent over here.

And you're trying to create a unified, always up-to-date version of the document.

You have to be pretty careful about how you set that up so that no one gets confused.

Right.

Because you have to sync it between the different people interacting with it.

And so there are a couple of specific best practices for how you set it up that make it fairly simple and make it fairly unlikely that there are any problems.

And Codex just actually doesn't know about those, which was surprising to me because it's like a fairly popular library.

And what I would normally do for any sort of production project is like,

when i'm in the plan mode i'm like hey like can you can you figure out how to uh can you figure out all the best practices for this and i didn't do that that's smart though that's actually a really good idea yeah that's a really good tip for people like when you're planning with your with your agent in the beginning stage like make sure that it's like okay look up you know the best way to do this um because otherwise it'll just riff i guess exactly and we have a plug-in that we make at every called um the compound engineering plugin

Yes.

That has a plan mode that's really good, really rigorous.

Kieran, who's the GM of Quora, who made it, is amazing.