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Reposted by Alex Clemmer

Moment @moment.dev · 03/03/2026

As a company, we @moment_dev have a single ambition: to make it possible to run your entire business out of a Markdown file.

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Anyway, If you are building something like this, we'd love to hear from you! I think we will all sort this out quicker if we talk about what we're doing publicly.

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Third off: although peculiar to our situation, because our documents are both collaborative, and also, Markdown files on disk. This means you can actually use stuff like `copilot` or `claude`, or `amp`. You can see where we ended up here: www.loom.com/share/f70bf5...

loom.com

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Second off, and very relatedly: it is VASTLY EASIER to inspect two `.md` files and compute a "suggested change" from them, than it is to build a harness that turns bad patch files and CRDT ops into good ones. The algorithm we wrote is in the blog post. (Not perfect; just easier)

opus-4.5 has very helpfully offered improvements to the Gettysburg Address

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Our approach is maybe the opposite of what you'd expect. First off, the models are very bad at generating `.patch` files or CRDT ops. They don't do line numbers well! But they are good at editing `.md` files. So it is VERY IMPORTANT that your on-disk format is `.md` (or similar)

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

But, we couldn't actually find anyone that does this, and the reason seems to be that it's super hard. Lee Byron @ OpenAI even gave a talk about this: https:// youtube.com/watch?v=kQSfXSliBzU But Google Docs, Coda, etc., all actually do something else. Cursor does do this, but only for plaintext.

youtube.com

Lee Byron (OpenAI) - Teaching Models to Collaborate

YouTube video by Local-First Conf

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

When we set out to do this, obviously, we wanted the agent to look/feel like a normal collaborator. For our product, we wanted a bunch of live-collab between human users AND ALSO, some number of AI users.

opus-4.5 collaboratively editing a document with human users.

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

(Here is a longer blog post about it, but I'll continue with the Cliff's Notes version in-thread) www.moment.dev/blog/collab-...

moment.dev

Collaborative editing with AI is really, really hard / Moment devlog

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

🧵 Collab editing with AI is really, really hard. Some day I will fully internalize that nothing in text editing is ever truly solved. Like alcoholism, it's a problem that never really goes away. A tumble-dryer that exclusively outputs mismatched socks/other off-by-one errors.

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

More spite-driven version control UI, this time for git push.

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

Increasingly annoyed with modern version control UI, I have spent a bunch of time this holiday break playing around with a new, "bladed" UI for exploring commits, branches, and commit history.

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Also lol oops meant to tweet this from Moment bsky account

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Surprise 3: React's monolithic render pass is surprisingly generally not in the way of achieving 60fps???

Segment of blog post explaining that React's monolithic render loop is generally NOT at the root of perf problems???

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Surprise 2: That includes almost all available text collaboration libraries??

Segment of blog post explaining that even collaboration libraries generally do not appear to be designed for 60fps.

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Surprise 1: almost no libraries are really built to achieve 60fps. :(

Segment of the blog post explaining how almost no libraries appear to be built for 60fps.

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Changelog 0004: Underappreciated aspects of text editor performance. 🧵 www.moment.dev/blog/changel...

moment.dev

Introducing the Moment devlog / Moment devlog

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Ok ok, it's a Yaak-style API client. But, you know, without all the features. The idea is: type in a URL, specify headers, params, and a body, and click the Send button. You receive a response. Or, you can paste a cURL command to autopopulate all of these things.

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

We're starting a changelog! :) bsky.app/profile/mome...

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

You can kind of get a sense of what we're going to talk about from our somewhat-bombastically-titled blog post, Lies I Was Told About Collaborative Editing: www.moment.dev/blog/lies-i-... Mostly this gets at how hard collab editing is in the offline case.

moment.dev

Introducing the Moment devlog / Moment devlog

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Now that launching true collab editing is imminent, we are starting to talk about the reality of building a realtime system like this. It has been... an interesting ride.

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

When we started to build collaborative text editing into our product, we had a very, *very* hard time getting practical advice about it. This talk is going to be just all the stuff we wish we'd known when we started.

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Every time you say this something terrible happens.

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

Also, your recommendation is right up my alley and I am excited to read it next. I think it's probably not about the exact same thing but, e.g., I really enjoyed Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower and the movie Reality (which was panned but I think is very good).

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

Yep I have been thinking about this for decades. Many years ago I thought it captured something interesting and modern about masculinity, youth, and fame. Now it is my own personal memento mori, a pebble in the shoe of life that randomly appears to remind me: you are ancient

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

What about if hypothetically you were a fan of complaining

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Alex Clemmer @hausdorff.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

if you die in canada you die in real life

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