A harness and user interface for AI-assisted writing,
from HCI researchers at UC Berkeley.
DocWriter is an ongoing research project at UC Berkeley. It is a local editor with a built-in writing agent. You can write any files you wantâmarkdown, plain text, LaTeXâand the agent collaborates with you, reading your text and comments asynchronously in real time.
One of our key UI ideas is to get you out of the chat when communicating with your agent.
You communicate inline in the text, e.g., [[ add a citation to ... ]], or highlight text and leave comments or suggestions for the agent to address.
Every edit the agent makes appears in place, and you review it inline before it takes effect.
DocWriter works with most frontier LLMs and SDKs: Claude Code, Codex, Pi, and others. It uses your existing subscriptions, so if you already have one you do not pay extra.
What are the research problems? Writing is different from codingâit is more personal, more taste-driven, and harder to evaluate mechanically. That means we need new harnesses, interfaces, evals, and good practices built specifically for writing with AI.
What does an AI writing harness need? Turns out there are many moving parts that are hard to design well: CRDT-backed documents and custom MCP tools for agent edits, skills that encode good writing practices and the human's voice, and hooks and subagents for rules and revision passes.
Writing a paper or book takes many rounds of editing over months. It is not obvious how to let writers steer agents in real time over long horizons, keep quality consistent as documents grow, or enforce rules across hundreds of editsâŠlet alone how to present changes without overwhelming the writer.
Everyone complains about AI âslop,â but we lack good ways to characterize it and monitor it over time, especially as new models come out. While startups like Pangram Labs sell useful slop detection products, we want to build open source frameworks that researchers and writers can use to identify slopwords and track how they change over time.
We are looking for user study participants. If you are willing to write and publish a blog post, paper, or other long-form document using DocWriter and share your experience with us, we would love to hear from you.
Reach out at [email protected].