Interlude #2 (Contract Playbook): Syrio Forel, First Sword of Braavos… and Patron Saint of UI/UX That Looks Great Until It Meets DOCX

Today’s detour away from redlines took an unexpected turn into the world of contract playbooks — courtesy of Google AI Studio, who in this universe is none other than Syrio Forel, the First Sword of Braavos.

It fits almost too well.

Syrio — elegant, graceful, unstoppable in the open courtyard — is the perfect embodiment of Google AI Studio’s strengths:
beautiful UI sketches, crisp icons, seductive prototypes, fluid interactions, and JavaScript that flows like water.
Ask it to produce a React component? It dances.
Ask it to generate a clickable JSON interface? It spins, twirls, dazzles — all with the confidence of a master swordsman.

But make no mistake: Syrio Forel is all front-end.
He fights with a wooden sword.
He does not do backend.
And when the real monsters show up — WordprocessingML, DOCX schema constraints, Superdoc module injection, tracked changes attribution, paragraph numbering XML, hard ProseMirror transaction boundaries — he meets his own version of Meryn Trant.

And as we all know…

“Not today,” Syrio says.
And DOCX replies:
“Oh yes. Today.”

Because DOCX is not a courtyard duel.
DOCX is a dark corridor with three Kingsguard, all wearing steel plate, all named Schema Mismatch, Range Indexing Error, and Unresolved UUID.

Syrio tried — to his credit.
He generated UI mockups, settings modals, JSON test suites that looked like they worked.
He created a debugging interface so beautiful it could be mistaken for a Braavosi fresco.
He told me, convincingly, that we could “build the whole product just by describing what you want.”

And then I said:
“Okay, now apply tracked changes to a DOCX with stable paragraph IDs and ProseMirror node mapping.”

And Syrio fell like a log.

Not for lack of heart.
But because vibes-based front-end magic cannot parse WordprocessingML, and a water dancer cannot block XML with a wooden sword.

Meanwhile, Superdoc — bless it — is actually a brilliant online engine for positional DOCX editing.
Its node tree structure is closer to Word than any JS editor I’ve ever seen.
But Syrio Forel, the First Sword of Braavos, is still studying its ways…
…slowly, carefully, and with that same elegant flourish that makes you want to believe he’ll figure it out this time.

Yet somewhere in the shadows, tracked changes and DOCX formatting lurk like Trants — waiting to swing the hard, ugly, backend steel that no amount of Braavosi confidence can deflect.

As for that JSON test suite he generated for me?
Beautiful. Polished. Even clickable.
But as any Braavosi would ask:

“Do you truly know what lies beneath the surface of the water?”

Spoiler:
We do not.
Not yet.

But it was a delightful detour, and a beautiful one — even if Syrio cannot win this war alone.

From the human-in-the-loop: It's a longish-story, but the TLDR is that I'm trying to see if Google AI Studio can produce workable solutions easily. It's prototyping for the future "SERIOUS" contract playbook with a proper backend. Currently deep in the woods after implementing an "Intermediate Representation" model that doesn't require the LLM to do JSON formatting (dealt with by a parser).