SmallDocs - an office suite for coding agents
Learn how to “sdoc”
When installed, all your agent sessions know about SmallDocs (shorthand: "sdoc") and its capabilities. Get an agent to generate a SmallDoc by simply mentioning "sdoc".
Example sdocs:
“Claude, sdoc me a pitch deck with a live financial model”
“Codex, read the browser-use repo and sdoc me its architecture”
“Claude, make me a deck on the DRY coding principle in Patagonia’s brand colors”
“DeepSeek, sdoc me a 5-year dividend consistency study”
“Claude, sdoc me this rate-limiter file so I can read it”
“Claude, sdoc me a walkthrough of how these two files rate-limit a request”
About SmallDocs
How does SmallDocs work?
SmallDocs is a command-line tool. You run sdoc file.md and it opens that Markdown file, styled, in your browser. Anything with access to your machine can invoke it - you at the terminal, or a coding agent working in your project.
Because the file opens in the browser, we can use the flexible capabilities of HTML and CSS to create highly complex documents. This means Markdown rendered on smalldocs.org can do much more than plain text.
To build charts, diagrams, slides, spreadsheets or render code, your agent (or you) runs commands like sdoc charts, sdoc diagrams, or sdoc slides. These return instructions about how to write Markdown in the specific way SmallDocs expects to create complex elements. This information is used to build beautiful, expressive and token-efficient documents.
How do my agents know about SmallDocs?
Running sdoc setup writes a short SmallDocs section into your coding agent’s global config files (~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, ~/.codex/AGENTS.md, and the like). That section tells the agent what sdoc is, when to use it, and which commands exist. (This "base agent file" is a pattern all coding agents come with, we are just building on top of it.)
Every agent session after that includes this small additional context on startup. This means you simply ask your agent to build you a "sdoc" or "SmallDoc" and it knows what to do.
How is SmallDocs 100% private?
When you open a file, the CLI compresses and encodes its content into the URL’s hash fragment (everything after the #) and opens a URL of this shape:
https://smalldocs.org/#md={your encoded document}<br>└──────────┬──────────┘<br>never leaves your browser<br>Browsers never send the hash fragment to the server, so your document stays on your machine. The server sees a request for the page; it does not see your document.
“The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client” - MDN Web Docs
The one feature that uploads anything is a short link (click generate short link, or run sdoc share file.md), which is end-to-end encrypted: your browser generates a random key, encrypts the document locally with AES-GCM, and uploads only the ciphertext. The decryption key lives in the URL fragment - just like the document content described above.
https://smalldocs.org/s/{short id}#k={encryption key}<br>└───┬───┘ └───────┬──────┘<br>│ │<br>sent to never leaves<br>server your browser<br>The longer version, with verifiable steps, is at smalldocs.org/privacy.
Free for personal use
Install SmallDocs for unlimited personal use. Your agent creates beautiful documents you can read, style and share.
curl -fsSL https://smalldocs.org/install | sh
# then, in a new terminal:
sdoc setup
Let your agent install SmallDocs
Paste the prompt below into a coding-agent session (Claude Code, Codex, opencode, etc). It walks the agent through installing sdoc, wiring it into your global agent config so every future session knows about it, and verifying everything works.
Install notes
The script runs on macOS and Linux. It installs everything into ~/.sdocs, a folder you own, so it never needs sudo. Re-running it upgrades in place.
On Windows, or via npm, install with npm i -g sdocs-dev.
After installing, run sdoc setup to wire SmallDocs into your coding-agent config files. The setup command is interactive; answer Y when it asks which files to update.
What to check after installing
A few quick checks once sdoc is installed:
Run which sdoc in a new terminal and confirm it returns a path. If it doesn’t, your shell hasn’t picked up the updated PATH yet, open a fresh terminal or source your shell rc file.
Run sdoc --version to confirm the CLI launches and is current.
Open a fresh chat session with your coding agent and ask it to “sdoc me a test file”. A styled document should open in your browser.
If the agent doesn’t recognize the request, check that the SmallDocs section in your global agent config (e.g. ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md) was written by sdoc setup.
Updating the CLI
Update to the latest SmallDocs in place:
sdoc upgrade
If sdoc isn’t found, re-run the installer, which upgrades in place: curl -fsSL...