IMO, this is a better approach than the one used by Anthropic docx editing skill.
1. Did you compare this one with other document editing agents? Did you have any other ideas on how to make AI see and make edits to documents?
2. What happens if the document is a big book? How do you manage context when loading big documents?
PS:I'm working on an AI agent for Zoho Writer(gdocs alternative) and I've landed on a similar html based approach. The difference is I ask the AI to use my minimal commands (addnode, replacenode, removenode) to operate over the HTML and convert them into ops.
This works pretty well for me.
We wrote CLIs for Confluence, Jira, and Zendesk, with skills to match. We use a simple OAuth flow for users to login (e.g., they would run jira login). Then confluence/jira/zendesk each have REST APIs to query pages/issues/tickets and submit changes, which is what our CLIs would use. Claude Code was exceptional at finding the documentation for these and implementing them. Only took a couple days to set these up and Claude Code is now remarkably good at loading the skills and using the CLIs. We use the skills to embed a lot of domain-specific information about projects, organisation of pages, conventions, standard workflows, etc.
Being able to embed company-specific links between services has been remarkably useful. For example, we look for specific patterns in pages like AIT-553 or zd124132 and then can provide richer cross-links to Jira or Zendesk that help agents navigate between services. This has made agents really efficient at finding information, and it makes them much more likely to actually read from multiple systems. Before we made changes like this, they would often rabbit-hole only looking at confluence pages, or only looking at jira issues, even when there was a lot of very relevant information in other systems.
My favourite is the confluence integration though, as I like to record a lot of worklog-style information in there that I would previously write down as markdown files. It's nicer to have these in Confluence as then they are accessible no matter what repo I am working in, what region I am working in, or what branch or feature I'm working on. I've been meaning to try to set something similar up for my personal projects using the new Obsidian CLI.
We have been doing something similar but it sounds like you have come further along this way of working. We (with help from Claude) have built a similar tool that you describe to interface with our task- and project management system, and use it together with the Gitlab and Github CLI tools to allow agents to read tickets, formulate a plan and create solutions and create MR/PR to the relevant repos. For most of our knowledge base we use Markdown but some of it is tied up in Confluence, that's why I have an interest in that part. And, some is even in workflows are in Google Docs which makes the OP tool interesting as well -- currently our tool output Markdown and we just "paste from markdown" into Gdocs. We might be able to revise and improve that too.
(Not OP, but have been looking into setting up a system for a similar use case)
Works wonderfully!