This is not a heroic founding myth. It is closer to a shared itch that refused to go away.
The scene that kept repeating
Someone on the team (or a friend, or a demo, or a late-night "please just fix the sheet") asks an agent to edit a real file.
What happens next is always a little tragicomic:
- The model understands the request.
- The file format is a zoo (zipped XML wearing a friendly extension).
- You either lose structure, blow the token budget re-reading the whole thing, or ship a diff you cannot roll back when the agent gets creative at 2 a.m.
We got tired of treating that as "user error." It is infrastructure error. Humans invented .git/ so software didn't have to run on vibes. Agents still run file edits on vibes.
Why this, why now
Agents got good enough that people trust them with work that used to mean a junior analyst and three coffees. Trust without a write path is theater. The moment you care about audit trails, multi-session projects, or "undo that last automation," you need something under the chat window.
We looked for the thin layer that should already exist:
- one set of tools (search / read / patch / revert)
- memory that survives sessions (cache in a
.all/directory) - formats people already have (start with Office-ish reality; expand to everything else humans produce)
Nobody was shipping that as the main course. Plenty of "AI for Excel" skins. Lots of paste-and-pray. Not enough "every agent file edit goes through a responsible path."
So we stopped waiting and started dotall.
The naming accident that wasn't
The name is almost too on-the-nose. Dot for extensions and hidden dirs. All for the wildcard. Logo: a dot inside an asterisk. If you have ever typed *.docx, you already get the joke. We wrote that up separately if you want the full nerd walkthrough.
What "needed" means to us
It is needed because:
- Re-parsing the same workbook every Monday is expensive and silly.
- Silent overwrites are not a product feature.
- Media, lab data, and the rest will hit the same wall once agents leave the spreadsheet demo.
We would rather own the boring layer — cache, versions, clean reverts — than invent another chat that pretends the filesystem is a single attachment.
Who's writing this
Harshit (harshitmorj@dotall.dev) and Khushang (khushangsingla@dotall.dev). Two people who would still rather argue about formats than pretend "upload again" is architecture.
If you are building something where the files are load-bearing, tell us what breakages you live with. That's our product backlog, not your dirty secret.
Early access is here. We will spam you only when there is something to open.