We Made a Document Editor Where Humans and AI Work Side by Side

Summary

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Podcast Summary: AI & I — “We Made a Document Editor Where Humans and AI Work Side by Side”

Host: Dan Shipper
Guests: Brandon, Kieran, Naveen, Austin
Date: March 11, 2026

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Episode Overview

This special episode marks the public launch of “Proof,” a live, collaborative web-based document editor designed for seamless, side-by-side collaboration between humans and AI agents. The conversation delves deep into the product’s origins, design philosophy, technical evolution, and real-world use cases within the team at Every. The group, consisting of founders and power users from Every and Quora, explores how Proof is fundamentally changing both creative and business workflows by making AI-native collaboration frictionless, transparent, and intuitive.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Origins & Evolution of “Proof”

• Genesis of the Idea

  • Proof originated as a response to changing writing workflows driven by AI, with a need to clearly distinguish human vs. AI-generated text and make collaboration efficient ([04:12]).
  • Dan describes the predecessor, Lex, as an early attempt to blend writing and AI, but Proof takes a more collaborative, agent-native approach.

  “The original idea for Proof is like, we needed a good way to tell what was human written, what was AI written, but also how much thought went into everything. And what do you actually stand behind versus not...”
  — Dan Shipper ([05:20])

• From Mac App to Web App

  • The initial Mac version tracked AI vs. human provenance (purple vs. green gutters) but lacked the key killer feature: easy sharing and multi-user/agent collaboration.
  • The web version allows real-time, multi-user editing, comments, and agent participation, resulting in rapid, broad adoption inside Every ([07:24]-[08:12]).

  “...when you made it a web app and you made it collaborative, basically every single one of us started doing everything in there.”
  — Kieran ([07:58])

The “Agent Native” Philosophy

• Agent Native vs. User Native

  • Proof is built on an “agent native” philosophy: optimizing the experience for AI agents as active participants rather than passive tools ([09:22]).
  • Internal and external agent integrations are both valid; most value comes from agents with personal context (like “claws”).

  “AX is just as important as UX in this new world. And AX is just agent experience versus user experience.”
  — Dan Shipper ([17:04])

• Design Simplicity and Frictionless Onboarding

  • One of Proof’s strengths is its ultra-low friction for both humans and agents (e.g., sharing links, no logins necessary) ([17:04]-[18:36]).
  • It can be leveraged without prior “skills”—just copy-paste a link into an agent, and it can start contributing.

Real-World Use Cases & Impact

• Creative & Business Workflows

  • Writing plans, project documentation, marketing agendas, and personal creative writing all benefit from clear attribution of human/AI contributions ([02:00], [23:36], [34:44]).

  “...using my agents and proof to get here, one, speeds up creative writing for me, and two, I think does make it stronger and better and easier and I love that.”
  — Brandon ([00:12], echoed again at [36:14])

• Transparency and Trust

  • The color-coded sidebar (green for humans, purple for AI) quickly shows origin, building trust in collaborative docs ([14:03], [18:36]).

• Iterative, Agile Planning

  • Plans are lightweight, disposable, and easy to revise; teams make, debate, and discard them rapidly, supported by AI agent participation ([12:33], [14:03]).

• Collaboration Loops

  • Example: Kieran uses agents (Codex, R2) to draft plans, get agent/human feedback, revise, and submit changes, all within Proof ([29:11]-[32:14]).

  “That is like just sort of a loop that is kind of on repeat now at Every: you make a plan, send that plan to the product owner’s agent, the agent does a review, suggests stuff, product owner reviews, gives a thumbs up.”
  — Kieran ([31:44])

• Personal Writing

  • Brandon uses Proof for newsletter drafts, mixing ideas captured via text messages/Runs, outlines, and AI agent drafts ([35:04]).

Collaboration Philosophy & Open Source Direction

• Barebones by Design

  • Proof is intentionally minimalist—no accounts, indexes, or heavyweight organizational features. Documents are meant to be shared, acted on, then discarded or promoted to “official” company tools (e.g., Notion) ([40:12]-[41:16]).
  • Team members debate the possible future of features like a document index without compromising this simplicity.

• Open Source

  • Proof is being launched as open source; anyone can submit PRs or fork it, and it's intended to be dropped into other “agent native” apps ([42:16]-[43:11]).

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On the need for collaborative AI-native docs:

  “It became clear that what we needed was a live, collaborative, web based document that humans and agents could be in at the same time...”
  — Dan Shipper ([00:00])

• Transition from Mac to web & product fit:

  “When you made it a web app and you made it collaborative ... every single one of us started doing everything in there.”
  — Kieran ([07:58])

• On agent-native design:

  “AX is just as important as UX in this new world. AX is just agent experience vs user experience.”
  — Dan Shipper ([17:04])

• Frictionless sharing drives adoption:

  “You can just immediately share this with an agent without logging in, creating accounts, anything. That is very good.”
  — Naveen ([18:03])

• Creative writing use case:

  “I love proof as someone who writes about food each week... I can see what it wrote versus what I wrote for me...”
  — Brandon ([23:36], also elaborated at [36:14])

• Agent collaboration loops:

  “That is like just sort of a loop that is kind of on repeat now at Every: you make a plan, send that plan to the product owner’s agent, the agent does a review, suggests stuff...”
  — Kieran ([31:44])

• Minimalism as strength:

  “It’s like a sketch pad ... where I brainstorm ... and then I text it to you, or you send something to me, and you can kind of share thoughts or nuggets with each other. I like it for that a lot.”
  — Naveen ([37:07])

• On what Proof is and isn’t:

  “Proof's job is not to organize documents. Proof's job is to communicate about writing and about ideas and about where it comes from.”
  — Naveen ([39:55])

• Open source vision:

  “Ideally you can integrate this into whatever app you want to build ... it could just be a good example of this is what you can make and how you might want to architect things if you're vibe coding.”
  — Dan Shipper ([42:27])

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Important Demonstration & Feature Walkthrough

• Live Demo of Proof Editor ([14:03]-[18:36])
  • Dan demonstrates starting a document, inviting AI agents, and seeing live contributions appear with color-coded provenance.
  • Example of sharing with no login, adding agents by link, and seamless human/AI editing.

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Reflections on the Future

• Rethinking Writing & Collaboration

  • The convergence of human and AI authorship is changing not only team processes, but also the philosophy and social meaning of writing and document authorship ([26:41]-[29:11]).
  • The team wrestles with who is the intended “reader”—humans or agents—and when each is best suited.

• Protecting what’s special about writing

  • Creative and high-value writing remains a human core domain; informational and ephemeral content is often best handled by agents ([28:30]).
  • AI-native tools expand the spectrum of what collaboration and authorship can mean.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:00] Product need—collaborative, agent-human doc editor
• [04:12] Origin story of Proof and earlier attempts
• [07:24] Mac app vs. web app and accelerating product fit
• [09:22] Building agent-native: internal vs. external integration
• [14:03] Demo of Proof—creating/joining docs, agent collaboration
• [17:04] AX (Agent Experience) and frictionless design
• [23:36] Brandon's creative writing use case & agent provenance
• [29:11] Kieran’s summary of collaborative planning & agent feedback
• [36:14] How Proof influences creative workflows
• [40:12] Barebones, intentional minimalism
• [42:16] Open source vision and developer integration

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Final Thoughts

Proof is more than a document editor: it represents a new, fluid mode of collaboration where humans and AI co-create, iterate, and transparently track authorship—all with ultra-low friction. The team’s real-world stories highlight how such tools are both pragmatically useful and subtly reshaping notions of digital work, authorship, and creative flow.

Proof is open source and free to use: ProofEditor AI.

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Transcript

[Dan Shipper]

It became clear that what we needed was a live, collaborative, web based document that humans and agents could be in at the same time making changes and leaving comments and doing track changes and all that kind of stuff.

[Brandon]

I'm trying to write this thing for Saturday that's like an essay about a dinner I had at Squirrel, this restaurant in la. And so to get there, it's like a bunch of texts between me and my agent to push to this Proof doc. Using my agents and proof to get here. One speeds up creative writing for me and two, I think does make it stronger and better and easier and I love that. And I can see what it wrote versus what I wrote for me, which is really helpful and so much better than a Google Doc.

[Dan Shipper]

Work moves fast. And in the age of AI, the pressure isn't just to move faster.

[Austin]

It's to make sure what you send really sounds like you. From emails to proposals to stakeholder updates,

[Dan Shipper]

Generic and rush just doesn't cut it. And if you've ever stared at a blank page knowing exactly what you want to say but not how to start, Grammarly fixes that.

[Austin]

Grammarly gives you one place to think,

[Dan Shipper]

write, and finish your work right where you already write.

[Austin]

Most AI tools either take over or

[Dan Shipper]

stay out of the way.

[Austin]

Grammarly does neither.

[Dan Shipper]

It helps you break the blank page,

[Austin]

adjust your tone so a message lands

[Dan Shipper]

right for the specific person reading it, and works seamlessly across 500,000 apps and sites you're already in. It's loaded with agents built for every step of your process.

[Austin]

90% of professionals say it's helped them save time. 93% says it helps them get more done.

[Dan Shipper]

This is AI that works with you, not over you. In a world of generic, AI don't

[Austin]

sound like everybody else. With Grammarly, you never will.

[Dan Shipper]

Download Grammarly for [e-mail] that's Grammarly.com and now back to the episode. Special episode. Today we have been building a live collaborative marketing editor for both humans and agents. It works in the browser. We love it. We started using it internally. It's like really kind of taken off inside of every and so today we are launching it as a full product that you can go use. It's totally free at ProofEditor AI. It's also open source and we wanted to just do this episode to talk a little bit about proof, what it is, why it's cool, how we built it, all that kind of stuff. So for people who don't know, Brandon, you are the CEO of every and Kieran, you are the GM of Quora and also the father of compound engineering. I also want to welcome Austin. Austin's our head of growth and your Proof fans.

[Kieran]

I think we should go back to you, Dan, and be like, why is it even called proof? Because it's not called proof because of what it is now. It just happens to sound good. So what was it originally? And how do we get here too?

[Naveen]

I know you talked about this for a while, maybe a year already. So yeah, bring us through all the pieces in your brain. And also Dan is saying we built this thing, but really Dan built this thing and we're just adding thoughts and things. Dan built this whole thing while growing the company, while being a CEO just at the side vibe coding. And he's getting the vibes. He's so happy doing this. Look at Adam's smile right now. It's his baby. So that's really cool.

[Kieran]

Yeah. So the CEO built a new product on the side that now everybody uses that. Sick. And Naveen just submitted a PR that Dan just merged. I just submitted a PR that Dan's gonna.

[Dan Shipper]

No, look, merge probably, obviously straight to production.

[Kieran]

And so it's like now everybody's like, oh, wait, I want this feature.

[Naveen]

And

[Kieran]

it's kind of. It's amazing. But yeah, Dan, why don't you tell us? Why don't you tell everybody? Why did you start building Proof originally?

[Dan Shipper]

I mean, if we want to go way back, you know, we incubated a text editor, a word processor at every called Lex like almost three years ago, maybe more. Which was the first time that we sort of combined text and AI together. And so. And that was built mostly by my co founder of every Nathan. We spun that out as a separate company. And that was like, you're writing, but you're writing with AI on the side or like in line with you a little bit in the actual word processor. But it fundamentally is a word processor I think approve as being very different. Which is it's for this mode of writing that I've started to feel like a lot of us internally at evry are starting to do. Which is for example, when you're coding with AI, you make a plan doc and that document is mostly written by AI. And maybe you're going in and doing some changes here and there or asking it to change it for you. And that's a whole different way of interacting with writing. I think a lot of people have said for a while, oh, I'll never read AI writing. And it's like, actually I read AI writing all the time. And actually the Other place where I started to feel the need for this is actually we did this company planning exercise for our 2026 planning. Brandon set up these notion agents which helped us. For anyone who's running a business inside of every, you get interviewed by an agent and then it turns that into a like 2026 plan doc. And I just remember looking at all those plans. I mean like, wow, these are amazing. But also Austin submitted this like super comprehensive growth plan. But has he like really like, like looked at every single line of this and does he really stand behind every single thing? And so the original idea for Proof is like, we needed a good way to tell what was human written, what was AI written, but also how much thought went into everything. And what do you actually stand behind versus not. And so the original version of Proof, it was a Mac app and it had a little gutter on the side that showed like purple for AI and green for human, which it still has. But what was really interesting is in making the Mac app, I did all this stuff. I had. It had like this. It was a sick Mac app. It had this like cool internal agent integration with like sub agents and like all this stuff. But in using it, I was like, actually the killer feature is just being able to share, just being able to share docs and. Because what we find is if I'm working on a little thing with an agent and I make a plan, I really want Kieran to be able to look at it and I really want Kieran to be able to leave comments and I really want Kieran's agent to be able to look at. Just became clear that what we needed was a live, collaborative, web based document that humans and agents could be in at the same time, making changes and leaving comments and doing track changes and all that kind of stuff. And that was sort of like the evolution of it.

[Kieran]

And I will say, when you were building the provenance version of Proof, I was like, this is cool, but I don't really get it. When you say it out loud, it makes sense, but I wasn't reaching for it. And I don't think a lot of people were. I think the editorial team was excited about it, but everyone else was like, cool. Dan's off doing this thing, the editorial team likes it. Don't really know, you know exactly what's going on. And then when you, the second you made it a web app and you made it a collaborative thing that agents could and humans could work on together, basically every single one of us started doing everything in there. So it's Kind of just an interesting story of like finding the fit and now it's like a serious fit.

[Naveen]

And it's also whenever, like everyone uses claws or Claude or some kind of agent to do work. So we're also at this time where suddenly like, there is all this work done and there's all this stuff generated. But like, how do you share? It's like a first step to like memory or sharing or collaboration within a team. And it just feels like this is very natural as a glue to bring things together because humans can look at it. Like, I can look at it, I can open it, which is nice. I can trust it by looking at it. And an agent can do it as well. It's equally. And I think this is cool because this is your agent Native philosophy. This app is really built from those principles of Agent Native. And yeah, I would love to, like, this is your first Agent Native app in this way. Like, what did you learn doing it that way? Like, what worked? What didn't work? Because you say I had all these agents inside, but there are no agents inside. But there are, because there are agents. Like, can you tell a little bit like what you learned there?

[Dan Shipper]

That's a really good question. And yeah, I do think it has been really useful to do this because getting my hands in the code, I mean, they're not really in the code because I vibe coded this whole thing, but getting my hands in architecting the code, I'll say that has really helped me develop deeper opinions about how, for example, an agent native product can work and what are the different types of agent native products. So for example, you can be agent native without having an agent in your product, because you can be agent native from an internal perspective. You have an agent in your product, they can do anything in the product or an external perspective, any agent can connect into the product and do anything in the product. Both are valid. And sometimes you can have a product that has both. I did actually like the, the, the internal version, but I think what I started to realize, especially once we had claws, once you have a claw, the claw has so much context on you and what you're doing that what you really just want is a claw in your document with you. You want, you want like that, that co author hanging out with you and having an, having an internal agent that doesn't know any context, it's just sort of, it feels like not, it's not powerful, it's not that interesting. And I can, I can imagine there are certain times where you might want a language model inside of it. Like, for example, we have this way to. We're working on a way to summarize the document for the social share. So when I share it with you, you kind of get a little bit of a preview and that's like a nice little LLM summary. And I think there actually could be really interesting use cases for LLMs on sometimes. You know, Austin, you shared this document, for example, where we were having all of our clause update the document and just went. It just went nuts. It went crazy. And I think having NLM playing a little bit of a traffic cop role inside of a document could be kind of interesting. Like, there's lots of stuff to do, especially now that there's. Now that text is so cheap to produce. One thing that you care about is provenance potentially. And I think that was less important than I thought. But like, you also need. I have this feeling like I need a canonical version of a document that doesn't get updated unless I really say yes. And then I want the agents to have all these other versions that they can mess around with and we can take what's good about each of the different versions and put it into the canonical version. So that's what I love about getting to build this stuff, is you start to get intuitions for. Now that we've relaxed this constraint, now that now that agents can write inside of a text editor super easily and they can write a ton, it opens up all of these different possibilities for what you might want your text editor to be, especially if you're mostly optimizing it for the agents to do the writing and humans can write. But usually when I'm writing in proof, it's like I feel like I'm God coming down and just giving my little sentence or whatever because it's so rare.

[Kieran]

Yeah, I think we should. I think a couple other things that I realized through using it a bunch is like, I always knew that giving context to an AI is so important, but through proof, I realized how important it is to create like such a good plan, how much more effective it is to create a good plan and then say, go do that plan. Proof is a place where you can do that. You can work on the plan together and then say, go do that plan. And I know we all have really good examples of that. The other thing that I realized is, Dan, when you first told me about it, I was like, oh, cool, but we need a place to save these things, which is true, and we're going to launch that. But it actually doesn't matter that much. Because the reality is plans are really short term. They help you do long horizon things, but in the grand scheme of things, they're just a moment and then they don't matter anymore. So that's been amazing. I have five proof documents open right now, and especially because I make them with my claw, because my claw has a skill. And she just knows to make proof documents. When I want to make a plan, I don't even need a place to save them because I just say, zosia, pull up the slack to discord to slack proof. And she sends it to me. Um, so those have been like interesting experiences that are different than, you know, normal working.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, totally. It, like, it's. It's part of. It's. It's all sort of a function of text is really cheap to produce, it's really valuable, but it's also really cheap to produce. And so the way that you might design how you work with text has changed. So I can, I'm going to share my screen so we can, we can show proof. So this is what it looks like. This is the landing page. It will actually be different by the time this episode airs, but this is the landing page and it's super simple. You just press, start writing, and now you're in a document. That's all you have to do. There's no login. There's nothing like that. I can say proof podcast agenda, and you can see it has this green thing over here, which means I wrote this and I can do a little title. But the cool thing is, and I probably have to change my sharing settings in order to show you this. The cool thing is that what I can do is, What I can do is I can press add agent over here and I can copy that link and post and give it to my claw, R2, and I can say, I'm recording a podcast. Can you fill in an agenda? It's about the proof launch. And what you'll see in a second is R2 is going to actually join this document and write a bunch of stuff in there. And you can see R2 is right here. He's got a little claw icon. And you'll see him in a second actually start to write stuff in this document. And then I'm going to actually share it with the podcast crew here. So you can see everybody else here as well. You can see we've got Brandon's in here. We've got an anonymous collaborator. I don't know who that is. Hopefully it's nothing nefarious. That's me. I think that's Kieran. And in just a second we will cut through this, but in just a second we will have our two posting a. A plan doc for us. And let's hope it works Live demos, folks. It's.

[Naveen]

It's not live live.

[Dan Shipper]

So it's not live live. That's true. That. Thank God. Here we go. We got a proof. We got a proof. Launch podcast agenda. We got one thing. So we're going to. Yeah, go for it.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Naveen]

What is very cool is you pasted this snippet inside your agent there, but you don't have any skill or anything installed. It's just copy paste. Right? There's nothing more than copy paste, which is very, very easy. It's super low friction.

[Dan Shipper]

It's just copy paste. And the idea is to make it as ergonomic as possible. One of my things I've been saying recently, one of my bits is I think AX is just as important as UX in this new world. And AX is just agent experience versus user experience. What's really interesting about AX is if you want to optimize it, all you have to do is ask the agents. It's really easy to be like, how would you have made this better? Or why did you get confused? And how would you make it more ergonomic for yourself? And that lets you iterate the AX so that it's super intuitive for any agent to use it. And that's what I've tried to do here, where it is better if you have a skill. But it is totally possible for the agent to just basically figure it out because everything is available to it.

[Naveen]

Yeah, that's really cool. And I think because of that, like, I started using it immediately because it was so easy to get started. And then you feel it, you're like, oh, this is super handy. And you're like, oh, but I want some refinement here. Let me create a skill around this. Do something like that. And then you're already using it and sharing it. So that is very good. Like, I think that is the. The major strength is that you can just immediately share this with an agent without logging in, creating accounts, anything. That is very good.

[Dan Shipper]

And here we are, we've got our podcast agenda. You can see it's all purple. We still have ARCHU in here. We've got Brandon, we've got anonymous collaborator, and I can just go in here and say hello. That didn't work. Wow, we've got some bugs here, folks. I can just go in here and do hello. And it shows up green and that's proof. And it has really changed, I think the way a lot of us work. Austin, I'm kind of curious from your perspective, you know, on the growth side, like are you using this and if so, how? And how does it. Yeah, how has it changed your workflow?

[Austin]

We like to move really fast at every we're always shipping new features and we run five products internally with just 20 people. It used to be that updating any of our landing pages was a huge time suck, but then we started to use Framer. Framer is a website builder that works like a design tool, which means that the people who are closest to your brand and your customers can shape your landing pages themselves. Non coders on our team use it all the time to ship website updates and the results honestly are beautiful. It's really easy to use. There's real time collaboration which means your team can design together, see changes instantly and ship faster. A robust CMS gives you everything you need for great SEO and content management. It also has advanced analytics with integrated AB testing that lets you optimize and improve continuously. Then it's just one click to publish. Your changes go live in seconds so you can iterate at the speed of your ideas. And it's not just us. Companies like Perplexity, Miro and Mixpanel trust Framer for their websites because the tool is enterprise grade. They offer premium hosting, enterprise security and 99.99% uptime.

[Dan Shipper]

SLAs.

[Austin]

Whether you're launching a new website, testing landing pages or building out your full site, Framer gives you the tools and support to move fast and build something great and everyone on your team can use it. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a framer specialist or get started building [e-mail] dan for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com dan for 30% off rules and restrictions may apply. Seriously, we use this tool all the time.

[Dan Shipper]

You should really check it out.

[Austin]

And now back to the episode.

[Brandon]

Yeah, I use it in two normy ways. I really like two of them just happened today actually. One is our colleague Rachel who produces the podcast made this Slack based bot to make scheduling live streams easier. She made it in Claude Cowork sent it to me and was like hey can you install this into Slack for me since I have admin permissions and it didn't quite work right away. So I went into cloud code in the CLI and made some changes to it until it started working and then at the end of the session, it's a thing I started doing with, like, a bunch of people on our team who, like me, are not technical but are pushing on these tools. I asked Claude code like, hey, can you make a proof doc for Rachel so that she can see everything we did and just send it to her?

[Dan Shipper]

And.

[Brandon]

And especially because it's so lightweight and easy. And Claude, especially on Opus 4. 6, knows how to recap that really well. I sent it to her and she was like, wow, this is so helpful that I can see what you did to improve this. And it was really funny. Dan, you and I were talking about how we were going to launch this thing, I think, on Monday, and I had this whole plan in my mind of like, oh, it's all about Providence. It's all about, you got to set. Send your boss this planning doc, and they got to see what you wrote and what the agent wrote. And I had so much conviction about that a couple weeks ago. On Monday, you were like, I don't really care about that anymore. It matters. But it's like, actually this thing where it's like one space for agents and humans to work together is really powerful. So there's that and the other one that I've really loved as someone who does a lot of personal creative writing and comes from a place that substack where people hold their own voice and writing so precious to them in a way that makes sense. And actually, people on substack host post all the time of, like, I know who's writing with AI and I'm judging them. Right? I have loved proof as someone who writes about food each week for a newsletter because I'm often like, I'll eat somewhere and then I'll text my claw, like, here's what I thought. And I'm like, keep a running proof document of my thoughts from the eating I'm doing. Because that's the best way to have a running doc. And then I'll be like, I usually tell it, make me an outline, and then I get an outline. It's always updating. And then I'll go in and write into the outline myself. And I love that. And I can see what it wrote versus what I wrote for me, which is really helpful and so much better than a Google Doc. I was doing that in Google Docs and one, it's really clunky with agents in Google Docs. I'm not smart enough to figure it out. But also, I can't track, like, what's me and what's the agent which is really important to me. So those, those two, which are a little more like personal work stuff, has been really, really powerful for me.

[Dan Shipper]

I love that I use it for that all the time. Like I use it. I have basically my daily to do list. I just do it in proof and every, every week I make a new document, I pin it in Slack and then I'm just, you know, it's. We're doing a lot. There's a lot of stuff happening all the time. And anytime something happens, I'm just like, cool, throw it in my TO doc. And that makes it really easy for me to make sure. Okay, at the end of the day, what did I do? What did I not do? Okay, R2C2 my claw. Can you just go take the stuff I didn't do and like push it into the next day or can we figure out how to like get it done? Can you just do it? You know, that kind of stuff. It's really helpful for those like kind of async document creation and, and updating so that by the time you get into it, it's ready for you to just like get started.

[Brandon]

Yeah. I got really excited yesterday during the madness of all of our agents trying to update that doc for us because I think Kieran like you and actually it was funny. All the GMs were like, this is insane. I can't focus. Way too much shit is happening. Because what we were trying to do is I was trying to build this landing page that was an always on reach test for every of. Like you could always go and see what is our team using for vite coding, for writing, for research. And I was like, oh, can our clause just update it themselves? And it's not quite there yet. They kept duplicating and then triplicating the page. But it made me excited because it's like this thing will be there I think relatively soon. Right. That it's like your agents can go in and update stuff and my agent can read what Kieran's agent wrote and then I can read the changes. And for a company that's using like as many agents as we have people, and for someone who does a lot of strategy docs, like in this world, it seems like such an essential way of working now once we get it right.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, that's so true. And yeah, there's this thing where it's like one agent who does one bad thing can pollute the entire document. And that's a really interesting problem to solve. Like you don't have to do that. And you don't have to worry about that in Google Docs because, like humans, there's a big social cost to ruining someone else's document, and humans are generally smart enough not to do that. But agents with great power, they have a ton of power and zero responsibility. So they often just do shit that you would be like, I don't think I would do it quite that way. I think that's a really interesting user experience challenge to figure out how could you have 10 agents in a document and make the output actually good?

[Brandon]

Yeah. And the humans plus agent collabs. I think if it's only the agents are working in this, and we'll see what they come up with is one thing or only we're doing this and then our agents read it is another thing. But coming to a future where we're somehow all working in there together, whether it is a planning doc, a piece of writing, I think we're headed there. And that's an entirely different way of working that we are breaking so that we can figure out how to make it work for everyone else.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah. I think another thing that proof makes me think about is, as people who love writing and all of us here are writers, what does it mean for the future of writing? And it feels to me like there's a class of writing where you actually want to read it from the AI more than you want to read it from the human, which is kind of surprising and interesting. That document that you made for Rachel Austin, if you had written that document, I don't think that she would have wanted to read that, but.

[Brandon]

And I think the. I'll share it right here because I think it's, like, it's interesting to see. I also don't really think that she should read it. I think, like, an agent should read it and summarize it for her. Can you also.

[Dan Shipper]

That's also probably true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Brandon]

Okay, cool. So, like, yeah, the agent pushes this. Like, there's so much stuff in here that I would never write or care about if I got this. Like, say, say I built something. Like, say I tried to ship something to Prod and Dan, like, you were reviewing it, and then you sent this back to me. Like, a version of this for, like, stuff I should have fixed. I would probably scan the headlines to, like, loosely see what this thing is. And then I would ask my claw to summarize it for me. And actually, there's been a lot of that now in how we work of like, okay, the agents are making big docs, and it even Applies to the Open Claw guide that you worked on with Willie the other day of like, I didn't read that whole thing. I had my agent recap it for me. And for something like that, that's what I want to do. But when you write your essay on the future of agent native architecture, I do want to sit down and read it. And it's going to be like. It feels a little binary in my head, but I think it will keep expanding into more of a spectrum in that range of what is what.

[Dan Shipper]

I definitely agree. I think that there's a lot of. There's a lot of writing that is more on the information transfer end of things and less on the storytelling and like, personal experience and like, vibe end of things. That is probably better read by an agent if it's. If it's pure information transfer. Because it's a little bit like in the Matrix where you like I know Kung Fu. You know, like, that's kind of the experience that, like, having your agent, like, read a proof doc is. Is like, I know kung Fu now. And it's just harder. Like, you actually don't need to know kung fu if your agent knows it. And you can save your brain for things that you're good at.

[Kieran]

I want to show the proof experience that I just had because

[Dan Shipper]

I think

[Kieran]

it kind of highlights the collaboration between two humans and two agents. So this is a little bit meta because I wrote a proof doc about how or I didn't write it. I had Codex write a proof doc about exploring the idea of adding a dashboard to proof so that anytime you make a new proof or somebody shares a proof with you, it saves into a place that you can go so that you can see all your proof documents. I have zero idea how to code, by the way. I literally can write CSS and HTML. I basically went back and forth with codecs a bunch and was like, okay, put this into a proof doc. And then it made this proof doc. You can see the only thing in this entire document that has been edited by a human is Dan came in here and commented. So basically what happened was I had Codex write this proof doc. I went to our proof channel in Slack and I dropped in the link And I said R2C2, which is Dan's plus one, to check it out and to let me know what he thinks. R2C2 knows Dan really well and gave a bunch of feedback, all of which was, like, really accurate. And then I think Dan on the side was like, R2C to make those comments, make those updates. It made those updates and then Dan came in here, reviewed it, he added a couple comments. So you can see proof does great commenting and agents can read the comments. So Dan commented here. I went through like, I made a couple more comments. You can see on the left side from the blue that this is basically all agent written. Yeah. So there's one comment on this. I told Codex, go back in there, read the comments and then update the plan. It did that. And then I told Codex to execute on that plan and it did. So I mean, that is like just sort of a loop that is kind of on repeat now at every where you make a plan, you send that plan to the product owner's agent. The product owner's agent does a review, suggests stuff, because agents can suggest stuff. And proof it does that, then goes to their owner who owns the product. In this case is Daniel, says, hey, Dan, I did that. I made some edits. Can you review? Dan reviews gives a thumbs up. And then I go back and I. I do it because this is like my future in proof.

[Dan Shipper]

It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's like I saw that come in and then I talked with R2 a little bit about it. And I just had R2 write you a little letter at the top being like, here's what I like and here's what I don't like. And then a technical appendix at the bottom being like, here's how I would implement this. And then that let you take Codex and have Codex just like redo the whole thing. And what you ended up building was way more on target with what we might actually use. And it's pretty cool that you're just submitting PRs. And I've not looked at PR yet, so it's possible, if possible, we need to start over on that one. It's a big feature, but it's a whole new world that you're submitting PRs and that I can even build this. This is a very, very complex app that I just did in my spare time in between meetings. And, um, and. And not only am I building it like you're submitting PRs, like Kieran's submitting PRs, Naveen's submitting PRs. It's becoming this, like, collaborative thing that we're all contributing to. Just a totally different way of building products that I'm really excited about.

[Brandon]

And it's the exact type of writing that like, makes so much more sense to be summarized by agents to flow in between the three of you rather than any human reading the whole thing. I think, like you said, Dan, we're all people who care a lot about writing and good writing, the quality of it, the production of it, the consumption of it. And that's something to be protected. But when it comes to something like this, this is about information and ideas and both accelerating how you distill them, accelerating how you implement them is essential to where we're headed. And it makes me so excited for how this works and also what is still valued and protected and kind of the other kind of writing. To me, I think it's easy when you think about this stuff, but don't practice it, to think that they're in conflicts with each other and that one's going to take away the other one. And then when you practice it, you're like, this is actually a very different thing. They're totally separate from each other.

[Kieran]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

Would you.

[Kieran]

Austin or Dan or Karen, would you write. Would you write anything that's not a plan or something that's like. I don't want to say throwaway, but kind of throwaway? It doesn't have a long lifespan in proof or would you go back to docs or notion for that?

[Brandon]

I'll show you one example. So I'm trying to write this thing for Saturday that's an essay about a dinner I had at Squirrel, this restaurant in la. And so to get there, it's like a bunch of text between me and my agent to push to this proof doc. And I like having these three separate.

[Dan Shipper]

And by text you mean you're literally imessaging.

[Brandon]

I'm imessaging my claw because I have these ideas. I actually get most of my ideas when I'm out on a run. And so after I'm done running, I'll just text everything so I don't forget it, so they don't escape me. And I like having these three different sections where it's like, give me this bank of notes I can go look at so I don't forget stuff. Give me a outline of ideas to write into if I want to. And then maybe you can draft it for me, but I actually only let the agent draft for me if I monologue into it. Because then I'm like, it feels like it's 70 to 90% my words that I'll use our speech to text to a monologue so that I can see it. And then my process here, which I have started doing in proof, is I either rewrite every line or I'm like, okay, I can see the essay now. It's actually very helpful to See it. This is a lot of what spiral does to our writing partner. And then I'll either start fresh or I'll just copy paste the outline into somewhere new to get it. But using my agents and proof to get here, one, speeds up creative writing for me, and two, I think does make it stronger and better and easier. I do sit here sometimes with some uncomfortable feelings of like, oh, am I taking a line? The AI added in. And Dan, you and I talked about this. A future version of this that I would love is if it identified what I monologed in. Because to me, those are my words, right? Like, if I monologue something into the agent and it uses it, those are my words. And I. I want to know. But I've started doing this a lot more.

[Dan Shipper]

I would love a little bit, like, if you go. If you hover over that gutter, it just like popped out and said, like, you know, from each. From, you know, monologue or whatever. Like, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff to do there eventually, once we kind of nail the most basic experience. This is. I love this. This is super cool. I love that you're using it for this. It's so creative and interesting. Yeah. Wow. Thanks for sharing. Awesome.

[Brandon]

Yep.

[Dan Shipper]

Kieran, what's on your mind? What are you thinking about?

[Naveen]

Yeah, what I like about this is like, clearly we need something to share stuff and this is a step. And I like how you build something very more complex. Agent, native, like the way. And you realize actually we need to just go back to. It's just writing and collaboration. And for me, it really feels like it's like a sketch pad or something like that where I brainstorm something. I'm like, ah, I don't know, just put it there and then I text it to you, or you send something to me and you can kind of share thoughts or nuggets with each other. I like it for that a lot. One other way I like it for is when I do a brainstorm with the compound engineering plugin. There's a step called brainstorm. At the end, it will say share to proof. You just do that and then it will automatically share to proof and you have a shareable link. I run in TMUX over ssh. So technically, thanks. Then then I can just click the link and it works. So that is nice. I can share it with people, but also I can just open it, go in, make suggestions in, like an actual document, and then just tell the agent, hey, made some comments, go work on them. So I also like it for Iteration with the agent itself. Just for myself, my question always with these things is like, yeah, but we have markdown files, right? Isn't this just a markdown file? And we have GitHub. Isn't this just a gist or isn't it just an issue? We have linear, we have notion, we have all these tools and they're pretty good clis and everything like that as well. And what I like about Proof is, yes, we have all of these, but there are all these connotations around what a GitHub issue should be or like what a notion page should be. And you don't want to contaminate everything. So I love actually that we don't have a place where you can see all your proof documents. So I would even argue we shouldn't have an index with all your proof documents because the point is that if you think it's important, you keep that link somewhere. And Proof's job is not to organize documents. Proof's job is to communicate about writing and about ideas and about where it comes from. And, and, and I think it's very strong. Like, and it's super seamless. Like, just that. It's so seamless to share it with your agents. And, and we don't know what's next. But like, the cool part is like Austin saying, yeah, I want to see what I monologue into. And like, I also like going into Document Ca. This was written by Brandon. This was his agent. These were the, like, the history maybe on the document. I'm like, well, let's see what we need to add and let's add that. So for me, it's very exciting because we have all these things, we all feel these pains and they're like, we're just figuring out a new way to do this. And I like that it's so bare bones.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, totally. I was very inspired by Naveen, who runs Monologue, where it's like, it's a simple product that does one thing super well. And I think that's what I was trying to do here. And it's actually surprisingly hard to make this, even though it's simple.

[Naveen]

It's very hard.

[Kieran]

Yes.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, it's hard. And Kieran, I love that you're. You're kind of picking up that the lightness of it is what makes it good. Like, you don't have to think about anything. There's no where does this go? Or anything like that. It just works. And that's what we're. That's what we're after.

[Naveen]

I still want to See your inbox feature, Brandon. But I'm just arguing.

[Kieran]

I totally appreciate that like, because you're right. And I have like 5 proof docs open right now and I really want to just like a quick place I go to be like, yep, that's it makes sense.

[Naveen]

Yeah, maybe you promote a proof document to like a special place. Like proof documents are always there, but if you create an account suddenly you can say, put this in my special blah, blah, blah or something.

[Brandon]

Yeah, I like, I tried to make a big like gross strategy plan and proof. I think actually I was sending it. Dan, do you and Brandon as a notion doc and a proof doc because I like couldn't really craft it or figure it out, but I liked going back and forth in proof. And the thing that felt intuitive to me was like, let me and either one or multiple of my agents jam on this like campaign strategy and proof. And then when it feels kind of like ready right now I'm like using the CLI to move it to notion. But I think like that's what makes sense to me is like, let me actually one click it into notion for us. For notion. Because that's where like our source of truth for planning and information lives. And it's like, okay, now it's like ready for that. It's actually ready to move from lightweight to heavyweight. It's ready to move from agent based to like calendar integrated. And that's like not with this. That's a much more complex product and probably unnecessary for what this project is. But like that's when it's ready for that. And that started to make more sense to be.

[Kieran]

Which leads me to ask you, Dan, this is going to be an open source product. Does that mean that people can submit PRs or that they can just fork the repo and do their thing?

[Dan Shipper]

Both, Both. But I think the most interesting thing is ideally you can integrate this into whatever app you want to build. We already have this internally. We have Spiral. Spiral needs its own live document editor and this is just a really easy version that Marcus can just like throw into Spiral.

[Kieran]

It's in Combat Engineering.

[Dan Shipper]

It's in Combat Engineering. Well the, the hosted version is in component engineering. But I think like, you know, for any kind of builder a. It should be. It could just be a good example of this is what you can make and how you might want to architect things. If you're, if you're vibe coding. I know if you're a professional engineer, you might look at it and be like, holy shit, I can't believe this.

[Brandon]

Works.

[Dan Shipper]

But be hopefully if you're making any kind of app that has a text editor in it, which I think anybody that has a claw right now is running into, this is like I need a text editor for whatever app I'm making. Hopefully it's just like a really easy drop in thing that you can use. That's proof, everybody. I'm psyched that we got it out and I'm psyched for the future. And thank you all for joining and talking to me about it.

[Kieran]

Thank you so much.

[Naveen]

Thank you so much.

[Brandon]

Thank you.

[Dan Shipper]

See ya.

[Podcast Host]

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