Interested in inter-app plan exchange and token efficient edits with Changedown?

[hackerbara]

Hi! I'm curious if you'd be interested in a PR to integrate the Changedown protocol into plannotator in some ways? Changedown is a new interchange format I've created that lets you put multi-author review and editing workflow tracking directly into single markdown files via CriticMarkup delimiters and footnotes, enabling 1:1 feature parity with word-style track changes and commenting/review workflows, and clean import/export from docx and any tool that supports changedown. The underlying format is all plain text, so any AI can read and understand it directly as well.

I could see lots of ways this could benefit plannotator and would love to contribute if helpful. I figure it's easier to show than tell, so I made a rough local branch version and a video showing subagents leaving reviews on a plan using the changedown tools in claude code, that plan and annotations getting loaded in plannotator, more feedback being added, and then the agent using the changedown mcp to deterministically apply the feedback block in one tool call. I then open the plan in VS Code with a changedown extension installed, enabling further review if desired.

plannotator-small-export-1775939664477.mp4

One big focus of Changedown is a suite of highly-token and tool call efficient MCP/CLI tools for applying proposing changes and interacting with reviews, which speak the Changedown/CriticMarkup edit operations as a compact DSL. In the video I made, I trialed a changedown-enabled review return format that returns all annotations as exact edits in that DSL so the agent can copy and paste that directly into the edit tool. Could be offered as a much more efficient way to apply edits.

The changedown operations syntax is also complete for all operations, so adding in first class insertion and substitution tracking in plannotator in addition to delete/comment could be an easy to extend feature. I also sketched out an "export to changedown" option that gives you the annotated plan as the raw changedown.md, could easily be extended to also give a docx.

If any of this sounds interesting, let me know and I'd love to talk about what integration points/approaches would be helpful.