📝 Google Docs for Markdown Files

Mark My Words

👤 Source: @jxnlco's spec for a proper markdown editor

❓ Problem

Markdown won by accident. It started as a way to write a README without learning HTML, and somewhere along the line it became the default container for human knowledge. Engineering docs, product specs, internal wikis, meeting notes. Around 1.5 million people now keep their entire second brain as plain .md files in tools like Obsidian. The format is plain text, portable, version-controllable and future-proof, which is exactly why it ate everything.

Then AI agents showed up and made markdown load-bearing. The AGENTS.md standard, the single file that tells a coding agent how your project works, is now stewarded by the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation and sits in over 60,000 repositories, read natively by Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Gemini CLI and more. Claude Code has its own CLAUDE.md. These files are not documentation any more, they are the instruction set your agents boot from. They are also the files engineers and PMs most need to keep current together.

Here is the kicker. The second two people need to work on the same .md file, the tooling falls off a cliff. Google Docs has collaboration completely solved, comments, suggestions, live cursors, full history, for over a billion monthly Docs users, but it treats markdown like a foreign language and mangles it on paste. The markdown-native crowd routes every edit through a GitHub pull request, which is a hard no for the writer, the PM or the founder who does not live in a terminal. So teams copy-paste between Docs and their repo like it is 2010, and the file that is supposed to be the single source of truth quietly drifts out of date.

✅ Solution

Google Docs, except it reads and writes plain .md files natively, so the thing you collaborate on is the actual file in your repo, not a lossy copy of it.

• The canonical file stays canonical. You are not importing into a hosted format and exporting later. The document on screen is the .md on disk, so there is no round-trip and nothing to mangle. Clean preview and raw source are a toggle, not two different products.
• Real-time multiplayer, the bits Docs got right. Live cursors, comments that sync and resolve, a suggestion mode for tracked changes, and full edit history, all on a file that stays portable markdown the whole time.
• A two-way CLI keeps it honest. Run open path/to/CLAUDE.md from your terminal, edit it in the browser with non-technical teammates, and the changes land straight back in your file system and git with no copy-paste tax. The engineer never leaves their workflow, the PM never sees a pull request.
• Agents are first-class users, not an afterthought. The same file your team is editing is the file your agents read and write all day, so human edits and agent edits meet in one place instead of two.

The wedge is deliberately narrow: own the one painful shared file, then expand outward into every doc around it.

📊 Key Numbers

Market size

• The global productivity software market was worth roughly $77-81 billion in 2024 and is forecast to grow at about 14% a year to $190-265 billion by 2032. Document collaboration is the centre of that market, not a niche of it.
• Google Workspace alone reports over 3 billion users and more than 13 million paying customers. Around a billion of them touch Google Docs every month. The habit of collaborating on documents in a browser is already universal.
• The beachhead is smaller and sharper: 60,000+ repos with an AGENTS.md, plus every team on Cursor or Claude Code carrying a CLAUDE.md, plus the ~1.5 million markdown-native note-takers. This is a technical, high-intent, fast-growing wedge sitting inside a giant generic market.

ARR potential