Every serious codebase has a .git/ folder. You forget it's there until you need history, a diff, or a clean undo. Agent work is still waiting for the same kind of boring infrastructure — for files, not source.
We call our slice of that .all/.
The problem isn't "the model is dumb"
Claude (and friends) can summarize whatever you paste. That's not the hard part.
The hard part shows up when an agent has to change something real:
- Tomorrow's chat doesn't remember yesterday's parse.
- Editing a workbook becomes "regenerate the whole thing and pray the formulas survive."
- A PDF, a Word doc, and a sheet that reference each other have no shared memory on disk.
- There is no honest diff. There is no single-call revert. There is a lot of re-uploading and finger-crossing.
That's not a prompt template gap. It's a missing path in the filesystem.
What we want, said plainly
We want agent file edit calls to go through us.
Office and workspace formats first — the messy things people ship money decisions in. Later: audio, video, medical and research formats (yes, including the ones that look like brain soup). The catalog grows; the tool surface stays small.
What .all is aiming to be for that path:
- Token-efficient reads — don't re-ship the whole file every session.
- Cache memory — parse once into
.all/, next open starts warm. - Patches, not rewrites — change the span you meant, leave the rest alone.
- Revert — walk a bad edit back without restoring from someone's Dropbox nostalgia.
Originals stay human-shaped. The agent layer lives next door in a hidden directory, like good infrastructure should.
Why not "just use the Office plugin"?
In-app plugins help one vendor, one app, one session. They don't give you a workspace that spans formats, a cache that survives chat restarts, or an agent-agnostic log of who changed what.
.all/ is the file layer for agents — any agent that can call tools, any format we teach it, persistent on disk.
Shipping in public order
We're proving the pipeline on load-bearing docs and sheets first. Cache and versioning should feel as boring as git status. The glam formats (media, imaging, the rest of *.*) follow once the path is trustworthy.
If your agent keeps face-planting on real files, get in the early access queue. We'll invite you when the formats you care about land.