Agree a good one this is needed but there are 4-5 semi functional Word MCP servers including one from the vendor. This one still isn't feature complete. This is going to sound rude, and I don't mean it that way, but how did you get accepted to YC for this? Was this some kind of pivot off your accepted idea and business plan?
Legit question :) so we've worked on a few ideas since we've been accepted to YC, one of them was the document editor for pharma.
After working on that for a while, we've decided to shift focus and work on the DOCX angle. We felt there's a big opportunity here since .docx is such a widely used format.
As to the feature complete point - I agree. We already cover the most common features today (paragraphs, lists, tables, tracked changes, header/footer) and we're working hard on implementing more. Our main focus right now is to be the most accurate, cheapest and fastest solution out there for common scenarios.
I've built tools using the agent in https://github.com/eigenpal/docx-editor. I can use my existing AI and don't need to connect to an external service, plus it is open source. Why would I use your solution instead?
Where I think it can break (and we show some of that in the benchmark post, though not on EigenPal specifically) is on tricky document edits, like multi-turn track changes, implicit style understanding (respecting surrounding styles without being told to), advanced list manipulation, etc. We also saw these problems get amplified on long-horizon, challenging document workloads.
Eventually we realized no product out there truly handles the wide variety of cases agents run into, so we set out to build one.
So to answer your question, it depends. If your documents are simple and you're happy with the results, stick with what works. But if you have tricky documents and find yourself chasing the N-th edge case, I think delegating that to something like our product makes sense.
we need to fill templates that customers give us, we’ve already built an agent harness with python-docx. It’s not perfect but it ~works. Does Vespper completely replace that or can our harness be used alongside your MCP?
Good question. Vespper is meant to replace the python-docx work for your agent and simplify things. That said, it can definitely run alongside your agent (either as additional tools to your agent or as a subagent that uses our tools).
For example, you could keep python-docx for the easy stuff and fall back to a Vespper-based approach when your agent hits errors filling the document. However, the end goal is to completely free your agent from python-docx and low-level work, so it can just focus on what goes into the template.
After working on that for a while, we've decided to shift focus and work on the DOCX angle. We felt there's a big opportunity here since .docx is such a widely used format.
As to the feature complete point - I agree. We already cover the most common features today (paragraphs, lists, tables, tracked changes, header/footer) and we're working hard on implementing more. Our main focus right now is to be the most accurate, cheapest and fastest solution out there for common scenarios.
Where I think it can break (and we show some of that in the benchmark post, though not on EigenPal specifically) is on tricky document edits, like multi-turn track changes, implicit style understanding (respecting surrounding styles without being told to), advanced list manipulation, etc. We also saw these problems get amplified on long-horizon, challenging document workloads.
Eventually we realized no product out there truly handles the wide variety of cases agents run into, so we set out to build one.
So to answer your question, it depends. If your documents are simple and you're happy with the results, stick with what works. But if you have tricky documents and find yourself chasing the N-th edge case, I think delegating that to something like our product makes sense.
For example, you could keep python-docx for the easy stuff and fall back to a Vespper-based approach when your agent hits errors filling the document. However, the end goal is to completely free your agent from python-docx and low-level work, so it can just focus on what goes into the template.