---
title: "Piary: exploring the interface between people and agents"
url: "https://divergenz.ch/projects/piary/"
language: "en"
description: "A document editor where people and AI agents write, revise, and run code on one page. Edit earlier prompts and save your work as Markdown."
---

# Piary: exploring the interface between people and agents

A document editor where people and AI agents write, revise, and run code on one page. Edit earlier prompts and save your work as Markdown.

Contribution: Human-AI Interaction · Prototyping

Technologies: [TypeScript](https://www.typescriptlang.org/) · [CodeMirror](https://codemirror.net/) · [Observable Notebook Kit](https://observablehq.com/notebook-kit/kit) · [pi](https://pi.dev/)

People

Nemo Brigatti — Interaction Designer

Baran Güneysel — Interaction Designer


Agents help us create and revise digital work. In chat, that work is arranged
as a sequence of prompts and replies. A draft or program can become scattered
across the conversation, with revisions buried among earlier versions.

Piary explores how an editable document could support this collaboration.
It combines [Observable Notebook](https://observablehq.com/notebook/)’s
reactive cells, [iA Writer](https://ia.net/writer)’s plain-text document model
and typographic focus, and [pi](https://pi.dev/)’s coding-agent framework.

## The page is a working draft

You and the agent work on one page. Prompts, answers, notes, tool calls, and
executable cells share the document. When you run a prompt, Piary uses the
document above it as the conversation history. Edits made during a run do not
change the context for that run.

You can rewrite a wrong assumption, delete a detour, or revise an earlier
prompt and run it again. The new answer replaces the old one in place. Notes
let you write without asking the agent for a response. Reasoning and tool
calls appear in labeled, collapsible blocks. You can keep writing elsewhere
on the page while the agent answers.

Piary saves the document as Markdown. Prose stays readable in other editors,
and executable cells appear as ordinary code blocks. The file is portable,
but it does not include all session and runtime state.

## Where the interface applies

Piary may suit work where the conversation becomes part of the deliverable:
a research notebook with live charts, a lesson with editable examples, or a
design decision kept alongside the code. Small tools can stay in the document
where they are used.

An editable document may add unnecessary overhead to quick lookups or
autonomous background tasks. The same applies to interfaces built for large
numbers of routine transactions.

[Open the Piary demo](https://piary.dev/)


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[Deutsch](https://divergenz.ch/de/projekte/piary/)