Heya folks! I built docx-cli this past weekend because my wife was getting tired of doing repetitive, rubric-based grading. At 20-30 mins a student with ~25 students, this was a lot of work.

So, I came in and told her I'd build a TA agent for her, only to run into Claude mangling a bunch of docs. I did what any engineer would do in this situation: got nerd-sniped into making a tool to edit Word files.

It clicked for me that if I:

1. Made the CLI tool edit in track-changes mode without committing

2. Wrote some fancy commenting across different spans

3. Prevented untouched / unrecognized parts of the doc from being borked

Then it would basically have the same protections we engineers expect from git but for Word files. Nothing mangled, and she was happy to decide which changes to keep.

So I did that and plugged it into my TA agent, and, lo and behold, some good rubric-based grading happened.

And then, as a former founder, I realized that this would actually be good for a bunch of things like contract redlining and so forth, so I decided to share with all y'all. Along the way, I made the tool read things out as markdown (since agents are good at it), and fixed a bunch of edge cases for things like moved tracking changes.