Introducing Roughdraft! A new open source project designed to make collaboration with agents better. The idea is to bring commenting and suggested changes to markdown (e.g. plan docs) in a nice interface. Free, local, etc. 👉 👈

There is a bigger idea behind it, which is to build momentum around a standard for comments and suggested changes in Markdown For example, tables weren't originally a part of Markdown until Github introduced it. We can do the same with comments!! Learn more here

Love this. Needed this for the Paperclip team this afternoon

idk how i missed this but thank you!! paperclip is awesome

Roughdraft is super duper useful! Ty for early access. I use it daily for reviewing and iterating what the AI creates.

amazing to hear!

when an idea feels this obvious you know it's good

Yeah, this is legendary.

@bentossell have you seen @plannotator? is there a difference between it and what you’re trying to accomplish?

Thank you so much for sharing this with everyone. In the demos, it's the human who leaves comments, but can it go the other way, too? For people who want to do the writing but make it easy for agents to add comments, does that work, too?

super excited about this. congrats!~!!

Very cool!

thank you!!

love it!

thanks!!

md is out, html is in

Coming soon :)

This is brilliant, @nbaschez! We're calling it Nathan Flavored Markdown, yes? 🙂

hahahahah

Looks like we're working towards the same goal

Great work @nbaschez! I think tons of us are feeling this paint point and scratching at different solutions. This looks super well executed - well done! Have you experimented with putting the comment threads in the bottom of the doc and using a custom footnote syntax? I love this whole thing except how much noise it adds inline to the raw md

i hear you on the markdown noise! probably going to change this soon to be an ID that points to yaml rather than all the comment info inline

Yes! I haven’t figured it out yet either but feel like we’re heading that way - a “backmatter” of sorts

Ideally, we want to keep the document model pure: no comment marks in the doc itself, only external comment anchors. The main use-case is commenting without editing permission / mutating the doc, which is challenging in every (rich-text) editors. Anyway, here it's just a parsing design, so it could work like this: --- The launch section <comment id="c1">needs a real customer proof point</comment>. ```comments version: 1 threads: c1: status: open comments: - id: m1 by: nora at: 2026-05-21T10:12:00Z body: Can we cite the Stripe launch story here? ```

@nbaschez Ok yeah that makes sense if you’re dealing with docs you can’t edit. I’m focused more on the use case where the md file is the source of truth and want that history to be able to be stored with it.

cute site

ahhh thank you!! means a lot

wow, how did this not exist already? excited to give it a spin :)

can't wait to try this!!

love this

Love this!

thank you sir!

How's it different from plannotator?

Had my own version of this with but find your version with the agents making comments directly very nice. Have switched to Roughdraft now, thank you for sharing this!

Glad it works for you!! Thanks so much

Hah, I prototyped the exact same thing the other day. You beat me to actually publishing it. Looks great, congrats on launching!

Great minds think alike! Haha

needed this like 3 weeks ago

sorry i wasn't faster!! hahaha

nice! does it support html spec files as well?

@bentossell @narphorium

This is super smart.

congrats on the launch, man. had a blast using this yesterday!

happy user!

ahhhh love to hear it!! thank you

amazing nice work! I love the move of having the install just be a prompt to share with agent.

thank you!! yeah feels the most natural move!

LOVE this... been yapping at my terminal like a maniac

Been looking for a tool like this for months. Bringing this into my YT script writing workflow ASAP

very nice! i've been working on (read: sloppily vibecoding) something similar off and on for a bit a couple primary differences: 1) the ability produce shareable documents is important to me, so I'm trying to keep the markdown free of collaboration artifacts, which has meant storing collaboration content in a json sidecar 2) I want to be able to access other documents in the repo / file system, including over SSH, so I need a file tree element

love the approach!

I know it’s a good idea when I’m lowkey mad at myself for not having it first. kudos! btw feels like this and Agentation are both hitting on the same concept/pattern… not direct manipulation, but something like it. we need a name for it. contextual annotation? idk.

love this!

Thank you sir!!