Compound rewrites Excel, PowerPoint and Word engines in Rust for AI agents
peterjliu · x · 2026-10-26
Most agent products rely on LibreOffice to produce Office files, which misrenders fonts and line breaks. Compound spent 8 months and 1 trillion LLM tokens rewriting two engines from scratch in Rust: a spreadsheet engine that loads, calculates, saves and prints Excel workbooks, and a document engine that lays out PowerPoint/Word files to PNG/PDF — all headless, with no Office installed. Agents render results and inspect screenshots to self-check (wrong totals, chart labels running off slides). Both engines also compile to WebAssembly, so what the agent checks is pixel-for-pixel what the user sees. The post includes side-by-side comparisons with Microsoft Office and LibreOffice.
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