Ampdraft
Version control for writing, without the Git vocabulary
Writing does not progress in a straight line. A personal statement gets rewritten six times, and the version you end up submitting is often a recombination of paragraph two from draft three and the ending from draft one. Word processors handle this badly: you either overwrite your earlier attempt or you end up with essay_final_v4_REAL.docx.
Ampdraft gives documents the thing code has had for decades -- real version history -- without asking writers to learn Git.
What it does
Snapshots. Save a point in the document's history at any time, with your own note about what changed and why. The notes are free-form; I write mine in Chinese.
Parallel variants. Try a different opening without abandoning the one you have. Variants sit side by side rather than replacing each other.
Word-level diff. Compare any two versions and see exactly what moved, at word granularity rather than line granularity, which is what actually matters in prose.
Materials. A place to keep the reference material a piece of writing draws on -- notes, quotes, source documents -- attached to the document instead of scattered across a folder.
Design decisions
The interface deliberately avoids Git terminology. No commits, no branches, no merges. The mental model presented to the user is a story line: a timeline you can save points on and fork from. This was the single most important call in the project. The underlying model is close enough to version control that the vocabulary would have been accurate, and accurate vocabulary would have been the wrong choice -- the people this is built for are applicants and writing consultants, not developers.
PDF export runs entirely client-side. Typst is compiled to WebAssembly and executed in the browser, so exporting a document does not require a round trip to a server or a LaTeX toolchain on anyone's machine.
Stack
Next.js and Prisma over Postgres, with NextAuth handling email/password, Google, and GitHub sign-in. Typst compiled to WASM for export.
Status
Live at ampdraft.com. I have not promoted it, so the user count is honest and small. Two things are designed but not built: AI-assisted comparison between versions and variants, and sharing, so a consultant can view a student's document and its history rather than receiving five attachments over email.