Launch HN: Vespper (YC F24) ships SOTA Docx MCP, claims 3x faster editing
topaztee · hn · 2026-09-29
Vespper (YC F24) launched a SOTA Docx MCP letting AI agents efficiently edit Word documents, powered by a fine-tuned model — claiming 3x faster, 2x cheaper, and more accurate than the closest alternative.
Key points:
- The team built an AI regulatory document editor for pharma; users wanted their own Word templates, exposing how bad agents are at OOXML.
- Word files are zips of verbose XML: adding a numbered list requires a new numbering.xml entry linked back into document.xml; bolding splits text into 3+ run elements — burning agent time and tokens.
- Existing approaches all fall short: raw zip editing, low-level libraries or opinionated MCPs (SuperDoc, Office CLI, Adeu), or Markdown/HTML round-trips via pandoc/mammoth.js.
Team: Topaz was a senior SWE at Snyk; Dudu a DL engineer at Viz.ai.
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