Why every agent project needs a .all/

Every software project has a .git/ directory. You don’t think about it until you need history, diffs, or rollback. It became invisible infrastructure — and now you can’t imagine building without it.

Agent projects need the same thing for files.

The problem isn’t the model

Claude is capable. The gap is structural. When you drop financials.xlsx into a chat, the model gets a lossy snapshot. Tomorrow, in a new conversation, it starts from zero. When it edits the file, there’s no version history. When it reads a PDF and a Word doc in the same project, there’s no shared memory between them.

This isn’t a prompting problem. It’s a missing filesystem primitive.

What .all/ is

When you run dotall init on a folder, it creates a hidden .all/ directory — analogous to .git/:

• Cache — parsed structure stored on first read, reused on every subsequent access
• Versions — every agent edit recorded before apply, with diff and revert
• Semantics — relationships between chunks, formulas, cross-file references

Your original files stay where they are. Humans never need to open .all/. Agents do.

Why not just use plugins?

Native Office plugins solve in-app editing for one vendor, one app, one session. They don’t solve cross-format workspaces, cross-session memory, or agent-agnostic persistence.

.all/ is the file layer for agents — any agent, any format, persistent on disk.

What’s next

We’re building dotall — the library and docs layer — starting with Office docs, then expanding to every file type agents touch: media, CAD, medical imaging, scientific data, and more. Cache and versioning ship free in OSS. The deep technical posts live here on the blog.

If this resonates, join early access.