Origami Gratis

I stopped asking how to make agents work with Office and started asking why Office still exists. Origami: deck, doc, sketch and chart as one HTML file, authored over WebMCP.

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Inspiration

When a new technology arrives, we ask "how do I make it work with the old thing?" almost never do we ask "does the old thing deserve a future?"

I hit this thought when making agents try to make the perfect PowerPoint at work.

Why am I parsing zipped XML from two decades ago?

Why is it three separate programs?

Why can't my presentation have the document as a Slide? why cant i have a full spreadsheet in my report?

What the hell is Visio?

Surely we can combine Excel, PowerPoint and Word into one tool by now?

Also, I find HTML presentations just look way more professional — anyone can scrape together a PowerPoint, but a slick HTML deck? Far less… until now.

And that's why I built Origami Folio, my eyes set on a Chrome extension because it was the best way for agent and human to work together. That was until I randomly saw a post about this hackathon and WebMCP.

What it does

Origami Folio is a full next-generation Office suite built in HTML.

Make presentations, word documents and spreadsheets from scratch. The word document doesn't link to the spreadsheet or paste a picture of it — it's in the document! And it all saves to a single file that opens in any browser around the world, ready to present and edit further.

The Chrome extension version already allowed MCP control, but it required the extension. With this version, agents just need a website — they can make everything, save it, open files and resume where they left off.

How we built it

WebMCP is new enough that we measured most of it ourselves.

The launch flag isn't documented — we found --enable-features=WebMCP by string-searching chrome.dll. Chrome silently drops destructiveHint, so every destructive warning had to move into the description itself. inputSchema arrives as a string. Halfway through, Chrome 152 removed navigator.modelContext under our feet.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest design work was honest saving: a page can't just write to your disk. So save_deck reports exactly which of three things happened:

  1. a real write through a file handle,
  2. a backstop copy in the browser's own storage,
  3. a started download.

It never says "saved" when it can't verify bytes landed.

Agents are also blind without native vision — not an issue for OpenAI models, but I want it supportable by all models. So inspect_render lays the deck out off-screen and reports the geometry — including the fold that validated perfectly and rendered as nothing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

An agent with no prior knowledge of Origami self-onboards from one origami_guide call and builds a complete deck. Venn diagrams, sketches, charts, flowcharts, Gantts — all unattended, through Chrome's own WebMCP surface.

No mocks, no shim. The demo video is 54 native executeTool calls, and the file it produces plays on double-click, full screen, forever.

This isn't a demo of a concept — it's something users can keep coming back to again and again as part of their tech stack.

What we learned

WebMCP inverts distribution.

Instead of installing your tools into the agent, the page hands its tools to whatever agent shows up. Distribution becomes easy it's all self-contained. Once it's loaded, an agent can call the tools once or a million times and it costs me nothing either way. (Unless agents reload the page every time, which they don't need to — then I'd be thankful for Cloudflare Pages' generous scaling.)

What's next for Origami Gratis

Honestly, my mission statement has been the same from the start: I want to displace Microsoft Office.

People, AI and the future of tech should not be beholden to the dead weight of a 25-year-old solution of zipped XML files masquerading as three different executables — and then paying extra for Visio.

WebMCP is new, and because I saw this hackathon late I only had three days to port this — so I'll keep polishing the experience and adding features until it holds full parity with the extension. Anything your agent can make, you can edit; anything you make, the agent can pick up.

Origami Gratis will be my hub: each petal added to the flower is a new WebMCP tool, until Origami Gratis is known as one of the go-to libraries of tooling for all agents.

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