alt Hacker NewsShow HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor
We needed a JS-first WYSIWYG DOCX editor and couldn't find a solid OSS option, most were either commercial or abandoned.
As an experiment, we gave Claude Code the OOXML spec, a concrete editor architecture, and a Playwright-based test suite. The agent iterated in a (Ralph) loop over a few nights and produced a working editor from scratch.
Core text editing works today. Tables and images are functional but still incomplete. MIT licensed.
Ah these poor fools. Having built this exact product (OOXML compatible editor in React) before, it took all of two minutes to find a bug. The issue is that the OOXML spec is not in fact definitive - Word is, and trying to implement it from the spec will produce something that works maybe 80% of the time then fall over completely when you hit one of hundreds of minor, undocumented edge cases. Assuming of course that CC did not just hallucinate something. And then there's the more fundamental problem that HTML/CSS has unresolvable incompatibilities with OOXML. This is why Google Docs for instance use canvas for rendering.