The presentation builder in Tiny Little Office, one of its ten apps. Image: MadRobot screenshot of Tiny Little Office
Paul Ford, the writer and programmer behind Businessweek’s famous “What Is Code?” issue, has built a free office suite with Claude in about ten days, and it keeps none of your work on its servers. Tiny Little Office, which Ford launched on October 14 through his software firm Aboard, packs ten apps into a website with no accounts and no server copy of your files. The whole document lives inside the link.
The link is the document #
The suite has a word processor, outliner, presentation builder, spreadsheet, calculator, drawing tool, diagram maker, animator, calendar and trip planner. Whatever you type is written into the web address after the “#”, a part of a link that browsers keep to themselves and never send to the site. To “save”, you copy the link. To share, you paste it into a chat, and whoever opens it can edit their own copy.
Documents download as PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more, and a short one fits in a QR code. Longer ones can go through an encrypted link shortener, where the browser scrambles the document before upload and the key stays in the link, so Aboard’s server never sees what you wrote. Short links expire after a month at most.
The idea is six years old. Ford’s co-founder Rich Ziade came up with TinySheet, a ten-line spreadsheet stored in its URL, at their previous company. Those sites later “fell off the web,” Ford wrote; this time he ran with the idea using Claude.
Ten days, a team of Claudes and a $5 bill #
“I think I built this over a week? 10 days? GitHub has the truth,” Ford wrote in notes on the launch, kept, naturally, as a Tiny Little Office document. The GitHub repository was opened on October 5 and has about 200 commits. Its build records show how it was made: Claude Opus models built features two at a time, and Claude Sonnet merged each one only once the type checks, translation checks, tests and build all passed.
The repository also holds a pre-launch review written from the point of view of eight very different users, from a blind VoiceOver user to a privacy expert “in the manner of Bruce Schneier”. One finding: the privacy switch promised “no trace” while the browser’s history kept every document.
Ford is open about where the AI slipped. His notes say Claude routed every page request through a Cloudflare Worker to check for social share cards, which blew through the free plan’s 100,000 daily calls the day after launch and briefly took the site offline. He now pays $5 a month.
This is ten days of noodling and the fact that you can have an office suite at say, early ClarisWorks level of quality, means that there’s an LOL nothing matters aspect to it all.
Paul Ford, co-founder of Aboard
697 points on Hacker News #
The launch hit the front page of Hacker News, where it scored 697 points and drew more than 200 comments. In four days the code has picked up 417 stars and 28 forks on GitHub. The developer Simon Willison pointed out in the thread that you can tell Claude to read the site’s llms.txt page and it will make documents as links. That is by design: there is a Claude Code skill too, so an AI’s answer can simply be a link.
Not everyone was won over. One commenter wrote that it was “vibecoded in three days” and doubted it would be around in a year. Others asked for live collaboration and file uploads.
Who it’s for #
Tiny Little Office is free, needs no sign-up and works in a web browser on desktop or phone, wherever you are. The interface comes in 21 languages, from Spanish and German to Arabic, Hindi and Japanese. It is open source under the MIT licence, and you can run your own copy on Cloudflare or on one machine with Docker.
It is built for small things, such as a letter, a rota or a bill split six ways. You can’t add photos or video, links get unwieldy past a couple of hundred words, and the maps lean on OpenStreetMap, the one outside service it calls. Ford is clear that this is no Google Docs:
It’s collaborative like handing out zines at a street fair.
Paul Ford, co-founder of Aboard
It sits alongside other AI-built answers to big-name software, such as ArtCraft’s free Adobe look-alikes and Bluesky’s Attie, which turns a sentence into a small social app.
Why it matters #
A respected software writer has shown that one person and Claude can ship a working, private office suite in under a fortnight, with its build process laid out in public. It won’t replace Microsoft 365, but it shows how cheap small, personal software has become, and that some of it is now made for AI agents as well as people.
Sources: Aboard, Tiny Little Office, Tiny Little Office on GitHub, Hacker News