It should be SO EASY to share + collaborate on Markdown text files. The AI world runs on .md files. Yet frictionless Google Docs-style collab is so hard… UNTIL NOW, and how about that for a tease.
If you don’t know Markdown, it’s a way to format a simple text file with marks like **bold** and # Headers and - lists… e.g. here’s the Markdown for this blog post.
Pretty much all AI prompts are written in Markdown; engineers coding with AI agents have folders full of .md files and that’s what they primarily work on now. A lot of blog posts too: if you want to collaborate on a blog post ahead of publishing, it’s gonna be Markdown. Keep notes in software like Obsidian? Folders of Markdown.
John Gruber invented the Markdown format in 2004. Here’s the Markdown spec, it hasn’t changed since. Which is its strength. Read Anil Dash’s essay How Markdown Took Over the World (2026) for more.
So it’s a wildly popular format with lots of interop that humans can read+write and machines too.
AND YET… where is Google Docs for Markdown?
I want to be able to share a Markdown doc as easily as sharing a link, and have real-time multiplayer editing, suggested edits, and comments, without a heavyweight app in the background.
Like, the “source of truth” is my blog CMS or the code repo where the prompts are, or whatever, so I don’t need a whole online document library things. But if I want to super quickly run some words by someone else… I can’t.
I needed this tool at the day job, couldn’t find it… built it, done.
Say hi to mist!
- .md only
- share by URL
- real-time multiplayer editing
- comments
- suggest changes.
I included a couple of opinionated features…
- Ephemeral docs: all docs auto-delete 99 hours after creation. This is for quick sharing + collab
- Roundtripping: Download then import by drag and drop on the homepage: all suggestions and comments are preserved.
I’m proud of roundtripping suggested edits and comment threads: the point of Markdown is that everything is in the doc, not in a separate database, and you know I love files (2021). I used a format called CriticMark to achieve this – so if you build a tool like this too, let’s interop.
Hit the New Document button on the homepage and it introduces itself.
Also!
For engineers!
Try this from your terminal:
curl https://mist.inanimate.tech/new -T file.md
Start a new collaborative mist doc from an existing file, and immediately get a shareable link.
EASY PEASY
Anyway –
It’s work in progress. I banged it out over the w/e because I needed it for work, tons of bugs I’m sure so lmk otherwise I’ll fix them while I use it… though do get in touch if you have a strong feature request which would unlock your specific use case because I’m keep for this to be useful.
So I made this with Claude Code obv
Coding with agents is still work: mist is 50 commits.
But this is the first project where I’ve gone end-to-end trying to avoid artisanal, hand-written code.
I started Saturday afternoon: I talked to my watch for 30 minutes while I was walking to pick my kid up from theatre.
Right at the start I said this
So I think job number one before anything else, and this is directed to you Claude, job number one before anything else is to review this entire transcript and sort out its ordering. I’d like you to turn it into a plan. I’ll talk about how in a second.
Then I dropped all 3,289 words of the transcript into an empty repo and let Claude have at it.
Look, although my 30 mins walk-and-talk was nonlinear and all over the place, what I asked Claude to do was highly structured: I asked it to create docs for the technical architecture, design system, goals, and ways of working, and reorganise the rest into a phased plan with specific tasks.
I kept an eye at every step, rewinded its attempt at initial scaffolding and re-prompted that closely when it wasn’t as I wanted, and jumped in to point the way on some refactoring, or nudge it up to a higher abstraction level when an implementation was feeling brittle, etc. I have strong opinions about the technology and the approach.
And the tests – the trick with writing code with agents is use the heck out of code tests. Test everything load bearing (and write tests that test that the test coverage is at a sufficient level). We’re not quite at the point that code is a compiled version of the docs and the test suite… but we’re getting there.
You know it’s very addictive using Claude Code over the weekend. Drop in and write another para as a prompt, hang out with the family, drop in and write a bit more, go do the laundry, tune a design nit that’s thrned up… scratch that old-school Civ itch, just one more turn.
Coding as entertainment.
The main takeaway from my Claude use is that I wanted a collaborative Markdown editor 5 months ago:
app request
- pure markdown editor on the web (like Obsidian, Ulysses, iA Writer)
- with Google Docs collab features (live cursor, comments, track changes)
- collab metadata stored in file
- single doc sharing via URL like a GitHub gist
am I… am I going to have to make this?
My need for that tool didn’t go away.
And now I have it.
So tools don’t need huge work and therefore have to be justified by huge audiences now (I’ve spent more time on blog posts). No biggie, it would be useful to us so why not make it and put it out there.
Multiplayer ephemeral Markdown is not what we’re building at Inanimate but it is a tool we need (there are mists on our Slack already) and it is also the very first thing we’ve shipped.
A milestone!
So that’s mist.
Share and Enjoy
xx
It should be SO EASY to share + collaborate on Markdown text files. The AI world runs on .md files. Yet frictionless Google Docs-style collab is so hard… UNTIL NOW, and how about that for a tease.
If you don’t know Markdown, it’s a way to format a simple text file with marks like
**bold**and# Headersand-lists… e.g. here’s the Markdown for this blog post.Pretty much all AI prompts are written in Markdown; engineers coding with AI agents have folders full of .md files and that’s what they primarily work on now. A lot of blog posts too: if you want to collaborate on a blog post ahead of publishing, it’s gonna be Markdown. Keep notes in software like Obsidian? Folders of Markdown.
John Gruber invented the Markdown format in 2004. Here’s the Markdown spec, it hasn’t changed since. Which is its strength. Read Anil Dash’s essay How Markdown Took Over the World (2026) for more.
So it’s a wildly popular format with lots of interop that humans can read+write and machines too.
AND YET… where is Google Docs for Markdown?
I want to be able to share a Markdown doc as easily as sharing a link, and have real-time multiplayer editing, suggested edits, and comments, without a heavyweight app in the background.
Like, the “source of truth” is my blog CMS or the code repo where the prompts are, or whatever, so I don’t need a whole online document library things. But if I want to super quickly run some words by someone else… I can’t.
I needed this tool at the day job, couldn’t find it… built it, done.
Say hi to mist!
I included a couple of opinionated features…
I’m proud of roundtripping suggested edits and comment threads: the point of Markdown is that everything is in the doc, not in a separate database, and you know I love files (2021). I used a format called CriticMark to achieve this – so if you build a tool like this too, let’s interop.
Hit the New Document button on the homepage and it introduces itself.
Also!
For engineers!
Try this from your terminal:
curl https://mist.inanimate.tech/new -T file.mdStart a new collaborative mist doc from an existing file, and immediately get a shareable link.
EASY PEASY
Anyway –
It’s work in progress. I banged it out over the w/e because I needed it for work, tons of bugs I’m sure so lmk otherwise I’ll fix them while I use it… though do get in touch if you have a strong feature request which would unlock your specific use case because I’m keep for this to be useful.
So I made this with Claude Code obv
Coding with agents is still work: mist is 50 commits.
But this is the first project where I’ve gone end-to-end trying to avoid artisanal, hand-written code.
I started Saturday afternoon: I talked to my watch for 30 minutes while I was walking to pick my kid up from theatre.
Right at the start I said this
Then I dropped all 3,289 words of the transcript into an empty repo and let Claude have at it.
Look, although my 30 mins walk-and-talk was nonlinear and all over the place, what I asked Claude to do was highly structured: I asked it to create docs for the technical architecture, design system, goals, and ways of working, and reorganise the rest into a phased plan with specific tasks.
I kept an eye at every step, rewinded its attempt at initial scaffolding and re-prompted that closely when it wasn’t as I wanted, and jumped in to point the way on some refactoring, or nudge it up to a higher abstraction level when an implementation was feeling brittle, etc. I have strong opinions about the technology and the approach.
And the tests – the trick with writing code with agents is use the heck out of code tests. Test everything load bearing (and write tests that test that the test coverage is at a sufficient level). We’re not quite at the point that code is a compiled version of the docs and the test suite… but we’re getting there.
You know it’s very addictive using Claude Code over the weekend. Drop in and write another para as a prompt, hang out with the family, drop in and write a bit more, go do the laundry, tune a design nit that’s thrned up… scratch that old-school Civ itch, Coding as entertainment.
The main takeaway from my Claude use is that I wanted a collaborative Markdown editor 5 months ago:
My need for that tool didn’t go away.
And now I have it.
So tools don’t need huge work and therefore have to be justified by huge audiences now (I’ve spent more time on blog posts). No biggie, it would be useful to us so why not make it and put it out there.
Multiplayer ephemeral Markdown is not what we’re building at Inanimate but it is a tool we need (there are mists on our Slack already) and it is also the very first thing we’ve shipped.
A milestone!
So that’s mist.
Share and Enjoy
xx