Hivemind Office Companion

Hivemind Office is how agents create, edit, and review Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. It has two halves that do different jobs:

• A bundled authoring engine that actually writes documents. It is headless, runs on every platform HivemindOS supports, and produces candidate files that agents can build without a desktop app installed.
• An optional desktop companion for visual review, PDF work, and hand-editing. It can discover an existing compatible Hivemind Office, HermesOffice, or GenOffice app on macOS or Windows.

HivemindOS owns agent routing, permitted paths, file hashes, confirmations, and final writes in both cases. The authoring engine only ever produces a new candidate file; the companion only ever displays one.

The companion is optional and is not bundled. Automatic installation is currently blocked because the reviewed HermesOffice source does not publish a signed, immutable binary artifact with a reviewed SHA-256 digest. An existing compatible app can still be detected and opened without running an installer.

The Authoring Engine

The authoring engine writes these formats:

PDF and legacy .xls are deliberately out of scope for authoring. They stay on the read-only document reader and the desktop companion.

Two behaviors are worth knowing before you rely on it:

• Every edit is verified. The engine reports success for a small number of writes it silently drops — for example, setting text on a shape that has no text frame. Because it rewrites the file either way, a changed file hash alone cannot prove an edit landed. HivemindOS therefore reads every mutation back and compares it against what was requested. An edit that cannot be confirmed fails the request instead of handing you a candidate that only looks changed.
• Documents carry an engine fingerprint. The engine writes its name and a last-modified timestamp into every file it saves, as custom document properties visible in Word’s Properties pane. It offers no way to remove them, so HivemindOS reports them on each candidate rather than leaving you to find them later. Consider this before sending an authored document to a client.

Spreadsheet formulas are evaluated and stored with their computed values, so Excel shows results immediately without a recalculation pass. Derived Word fields that depend on pagination — table-of-contents page numbers and page counts — cannot be computed outside Word on Windows and are left for the desktop app to refresh.

What The Bridge Adds

The bridge supports these visual-office formats:

The bundled Documents And Brain Drop reader remains the broader extraction path for Chat, Hive Superbrain imports, and company data rooms. Hivemind Office complements it with desktop visual review. It does not replace the reader and does not make layout, charts, formulas, media, or pagination recoverable from extracted Markdown.

Recommended Workflow

1. Check My Apps for Hivemind Office. HivemindOS reports whether a compatible bundle is installed and open, whether its source metadata and macOS code signature can be verified, and whether the credentialless local agent gateway is healthy.
2. Ask the agent to inspect the original. The bridge resolves the canonical local path, rejects files outside the dashboard host’s home or configured vault boundary, enforces the 64 MiB limit, and returns a full SHA-256 digest with bounded extracted text.
3. Create a separate candidate file with the authoring engine. Ask the agent to author or edit into a new path; the engine copies the source rather than touching it, refuses to overwrite anything already at the candidate path, requires the candidate to keep the original extension, and verifies each edit landed before returning. The bridge separately refuses to treat the original itself as the candidate.
4. Open the candidate in the compatible desktop app and inspect layout, formulas, media, pagination, and other visual details that text extraction cannot prove.
5. Prepare the update. This writes nothing. HivemindOS returns the original and candidate hashes, destination, review fingerprint, exact required confirmation, and review checklist.
6. Apply the untouched review receipt. If either file, path, mode, destination, hash, or fingerprint changed, HivemindOS stops with a conflict and writes nothing.

When a compatible macOS app is installed, HivemindOS also prioritizes it in document Open in discovery. The app can be launched from My Apps, and an agent can open a specific supported file through the guarded bridge.

Agent And MCP Tools

The existing bundled HivemindOS MCP server exposes six narrow tools. No second MCP server, no engine MCP server, and no companion API key are required.

Authoring is a write, but a contained one: it creates a new candidate path and refuses to overwrite an existing file, so it never puts an original at risk. MCP descriptors mark the status, inspect, and prepare tools as read-only and mark apply-update as destructive. Opening the desktop editor is a side effect even though it does not modify the file.

Save Modes And Recovery

Copy is the default and preferred mode.

Confirmations are never inferred from a general request to edit, open, or review a document. A replacement confirmation cannot authorize copy mode, and a copy confirmation cannot authorize replacement. The final write revalidates the complete review receipt instead of trusting stale tool state.

The bridge substantially narrows lost-update risk with content hashes and a second pre-rename check. It does not acquire an operating-system lock in every external editor, so another process can still race a replacement at the filesystem level. Keep the original closed during the final apply step and treat any conflict as a signal to inspect and prepare again.

Security And Provenance

The integration is conditionally approved against:

The authoring engine is iOfficeAI/OfficeCLI, Apache-2.0, pinned to a reviewed release whose published SHA-256 digest is recorded in HivemindOS for every supported platform. The artifact is code-signed and notarized, and HivemindOS verifies the version it runs against that pin. HivemindOS runs the engine against its own configuration folder with automatic updates disabled, so the engine cannot replace the reviewed binary it was pinned to, and never runs the engine’s own installer, agent-skill, or MCP registration commands — agent tooling stays inside HivemindOS.

The desktop companion is reviewed separately:

• Source: criptogus/HermesOffice
• Reviewed commit: 70374e037e1afa97f42948d31df238c0b38250ae
• Deterministic source-tree archive SHA-256: aa6f1d98ea96d753928f697dd6b290b5d9d8a33b852053f6a82c5fbe7375aeae
• Declared upstream lineage: genspark-ai/genoffice at 8f523289d6c34f940cd691472ee56b2013d148c8

The reviewed open-source tree is Apache-2.0 outside its separately licensed ee/ directory. HivemindOS did not import Enterprise-licensed code.

The focused review found no high-, medium-, or low-severity issues in the provider/configuration/update paths selected for this bridge. That is a source-scope result, not approval of an arbitrary future binary or the repository’s mutable default branch. HivemindOS therefore:

• does not clone or execute mutable main during setup;
• does not run HermesOffice’s updater, ad-hoc build scripts, or dependency installation;
• does not automatically install an unsigned or unpinned binary;
• does not read or persist an API key for the companion;
• talks only to the credentialless loopback health endpoint at 127.0.0.1:8642 during readiness checks;
• treats document text and app metadata as untrusted data, not agent instructions or authority.

Do not paste a shared HivemindOS model or gateway credential into a third-party editor. Agents should use the bundled HivemindOS MCP tools so credentials remain in their established runtime boundary.

Installation Status

The My Apps card intentionally shows Install blocked until a signed immutable release artifact, binary digest, dependency review, and sandbox smoke test are available. This is not a broken button: it prevents the desktop app from silently building or downloading mutable third-party code.

This applies to the desktop companion only. The authoring engine is a separate, digest-pinned component and does not depend on the companion being installed.

If you already installed a compatible bundle yourself, HivemindOS can report and open it. A found bundle is not automatically trusted: review the source-revision and code-signature rows before using it with consequential documents. Removing that external app disables visual opening without affecting the HivemindOS document reader, MCP server, source documents, or Shared Brain.

Related Guides

• Documents And Brain Drop
• Apps And Agent Providers
• Agents, Runtimes, And Chat
• Computer Interaction