Dirk Paessler's Personal Blog

Almost everything I write these days is written together with other people, in shared Google Docs — reports, papers, blog drafts. And for months there was one collaborator who couldn’t get into the document: Claude.

Not for lack of trying. Claude’s standard Google Drive integration can read a shared document just fine. But it cannot edit one. Ask it to improve your text and it does the only thing it can do: it creates a new file. Ask again, another file. Report-v2, Report-v2-claude, Report-v2-claude-final. Meanwhile your colleagues keep typing away in the original, and you are now the person who merges documents by hand.

For solo work you can live with that. With three people in one document, it’s hopeless.

The job description: invisible sous-chef

So I built Remy — named after the rat in Ratatouille who sits under the chef’s hat and guides his hands, invisible to the guests. That is pretty much the job description.

Remy is a plugin for the Claude desktop app and the Claude CLI. You give Claude the sharing link of a Google Doc — the ordinary “anyone with the link” kind — and say what you want, in the same breath:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/… 
please fix the typos and shorten the introduction 
by about a third

Remy reads the document, does the work, and reports back. From there you just keep talking:

• “Replace every ‘client’ with ‘partner'” — changed everywhere in one pass
• “Find the statistics jargon and rewrite it for normal people” — each passage marked up
• “Build a reference list from the citations in the text” — collected and appended
• “Answer the open comments” — replies to your colleagues and resolves the threads

My favourite feature, though, is for the colleagues who don’t use Claude at all: anyone can drop a note starting with @@remy into the text or into a comment — “@@remy translate this paragraph into German”. Next time Remy visits the document, it finds those notes, does the work, and strikes them through so no job ever runs twice. The document becomes its own to-do list.

Mint and pink

Letting an AI loose on a document your team has worked on for weeks is — let’s be honest — handing it a very sharp knife. So Remy’s core rule is: every change is visible and reversible. Nothing gets deleted silently.

Text Remy wants to add shows up highlighted in mint. Text it wants removed is struck through in pink — but still there. You and your colleagues read the proposals in the browser like tracked changes, and then you say the word: “Remy, accept the changes” or “Remy, undo the changes”. The second one restores the document exactly to what it was, even days later.

(A nerd detail I am disproportionately proud of: the two colours were chosen by maximizing their distance from all 81 swatches in Google Docs’ standard colour picker — so a colleague’s own highlighting can never be mistaken for Remy’s.)

The feature Google won’t let me ship yet

Of course what we all actually want are real Google Docs suggestions — the native tracked changes with Accept/Reject buttons. Here is the thing: Remy can already do that, and it works beautifully. The Docs API learned to write suggestions on 7 July 2026; the capability is only a few weeks old.

But it lives in Google’s Workspace Developer Preview, and the preview terms are explicit: preview features may not ship in public applications, nor be exposed to users outside your own company. So the public Remy contains none of that code — verifiably absent, enforced by a test.

There is a second, sneakier reason to take those rules seriously: the API lies to you when you are not enrolled. It happily accepts a suggestion request from a non-enrolled project — no error, no warning — and then edits the document directly, while reporting that it created a suggestion. A naive integration would silently overwrite a colleague’s manuscript and call it a suggestion. Remy never trusts the flag; it probes the real behaviour once and refuses to be fooled.

If you want to test the real suggestions before general availability: I am running a small beta. Email me at remy@dirkpaessler.com — you will need to enroll your own (free) Cloud project in Google’s preview program, and I’ll walk you through it.

How to install Remy

In the Claude app, go to Code, start a new session, and paste this prompt (see Remy’s Github page for detaiuls: https://github.com/dirkpaessler/Remy):

Install the Remy plugin for me: run 
"claude plugin marketplace add dirkpaessler/remy" 
and then 
"claude plugin install remy@remy-marketplace";
after that, find the installed plugin's remy.py 
and run its install-mcp command so Chat and 
Cowork are covered too (install uv first if it is
missing). If claude is not on the PATH, use the 
CLI bundled inside the desktop app.

Claude runs the installation and tells you when it is done. Then quit and reopen the Claude app once (⌘Q). The first time Remy acts in Chat or Cowork, the app asks for permission once (“Claude wants to use … from remy”). That is the standard question for any connector; Remy runs entirely on your own computer, so allowing it — including “Always allow” — is fine.

Small blast radius

You are not handing your Google account to an AI. Remy never sees your login, your Drive, or your mail. Instead you create a small robot account for it — a “service account” with an empty Drive of its own that can only reach documents you have explicitly shared by link. The one-time setup takes about five minutes in the browser, costs nothing, and Claude walks you through it. The key file stays on your machine.

And once a day Remy asks GitHub whether a newer version exists — that request is the only thing it ever “phones home”, and you can switch it off.And once a day Remy asks GitHub whether a newer version exists — that request is the only thing it ever “phones home”, and you can switch it off.

For the nerds

Everything runs through one deterministic Python CLI (about 2,300 lines): the model decides what to say, the code decides how it reaches the document — write mode, language matching and index arithmetic are decided in code, not by the LLM. 62 offline tests cover what is expensive to get wrong, including the test that proves the preview code is not in the public build. MIT-licensed, on GitHub: github.com/dirkpaessler/remy — installation is one sentence you paste into Claude.

When Google flips the suggestions API to general availability, that code moves into the public build, and every installed Remy will point out the update itself. Until then: mint and pink work surprisingly well.

Let’s see where this goes.