I walked into our home office and my wife was going through a Google Doc she was working on with some collaborators. A bunch of suggestions stacked down the right side, and she was looking at them one at a time. She had to figure out what they were asking, and how to integrate it into the document.
She uses Claude, and it could have reviewed those suggestions. It could have done any research she needed, discussed options with her. But it had no way into the document, so there she was having to do all of it herself.
She doesn’t have this problem with documents she keeps on her machine. With those files she and her Claude Code sessions can make changes easily with tools. She can tell Claude what she wants done and it discusses with her and just does it.
That wasn’t available when working with Google Docs. When she wants to change the format, review suggestions, or sync with a local file, all of that has to be done in the browser through the web interface. Typing, cutting and pasting, clicking buttons, adjusting formatting and hoping nothing was missed. All manual, and error prone.
None of that is broken. It’s fiddly, but it works, and we build good documents that way. So why did it bother me?
Because all of this is ultimately about communication. Documents are how we capture an idea, make it pretty to look at, and share it with others.
For a long time that was a one way thing. We wrote it, then shared it by email or by print. What got passed around was the idea in its formed state.
Then with tools like Google Docs we got live sharing, and suggestions, and comments, and what we were doing changed. We weren’t sharing the finished idea anymore. The document became the surface where the idea was crafted. The document became a meeting place, a place people could interact and shape their idea together.
That is the point of it. Not being in there typing, changing fonts, accepting suggestions one at a time, writing comments. Those are just things we do around the periphery to shape the idea’s form.
AI is here now and it can’t be part of that yet. The interfaces were built for humans. It is smart enough to understand what I want when crafting an idea, and to reason its way through my process. It has the brains. It doesn’t have the hands.
So I went looking to see what’s out there. The Google Workspace plugin for Claude Code had breadth but not depth, and it couldn’t work with multiple Google accounts, which most of us have. Most of the things out there in this space treated a document as a single unit. Pull the whole thing down, push a new one back. That works fine till the document has anything in it. Any tracked changes disappear, because a string has no room for two versions of itself. Comment threads get orphaned, because the text they were anchored to is gone and replaced by something similar.
What I wanted was to be able to tell the AI what I wanted done with a document in natural language and have it do it.
- Let’s review the suggestions in this doc. Accept the ones that don’t change the idea, and discuss the rest with me one at a time.
- Publish this file as a doc using this formatted template.
- Compare these two versions and tell me what has changed, research them for accuracy.
None of those are buttons. Every button in an editor is a decision somebody made ahead of time about what we would want and how big each step should be. Language doesn’t have that ceiling. With an LLM, what we can ask for is limited by what it understands, and what it has the tools to do.
So I built it.
I thought this was about efficiency. It is. But in service of what?
It let AI into the same sandbox that we play in. The same tools we have. Change the text, the formatting, the tables. Help shape the idea rather than wait outside.
My wife uses it now. Those things on the periphery take less time, time she uses to focus on the details and the ideas.
Every rote task we get out of the way, or make faster, is time that we get back to imagine, solve, and create. Taking what’s in our heads and making it something out there in the world.
gdocs-mcp is free, and lives at dasasian.com/gdocs-mcp.
The other side of this is Am I Getting Lazier?, on what I keep and why.
Months later, the same gap from the builder’s side: Pull Handle, Push Door, on the friction an AI can’t feel.