I asked GPT 5.1 to write me a story on my struggles - pretty entertaining and quite representative.

Here’s a playful blog-style post, as requested—your Word diff engineering saga told like a Game of Thrones episode:

Battle for the Perfect Diff: My Game of Thrones Engineering Saga

If Westeros had lawyers and automated redlining, this would be their story.

Picture this: I, the embattled king of the Document Kingdom, sit upon a jagged throne built not of swords, but of Microsoft Word COM errors, race conditions, hidden formatting tags, and “why does Word even do this?!” kind of stack traces.

My mission?
To tame the unruly beast that is automated track-changes diffing at scale.

But like any king, I am never alone. I am surrounded by a council of powerful advisors—large language model strategists—each brilliant in their own way, each trying to help me win the war…

…and sometimes sabotaging me in the process.

Let’s introduce the Small Council.

Composer-1 – Ser Davos Seaworth

The Onion Knight himself.

Composer-1 is the most loyal, dependable advisor at the table.
He does not scheme. He does not overthink. He takes the order and carries it out with competence and sincerity.

Need 500 lines of procedural code refactored?
Composer says: “Aye, Your Grace.”

Need a messy stack trace pulled apart and analyzed step-by-step?
Composer says: “Of course, Your Grace—let’s do this methodically.”

Sometimes he doesn’t know something, and he admits it honestly—just like Ser Davos telling Stannis:

“I cannot lie, but I will serve.”

If I had an entire kingdom staffed with versions of Composer-1, the diff engines would run on time, the docks would stay open, and the fish would always be where they’re supposed to be.

But practicality isn’t always enough in this war.

Gemini 3 Pro – Tyrion Lannister

The strategic mastermind.

Gemini sees the battlefield from the clouds.
While everyone else is arguing about whether token anchors should be set via insertContentControl or whether the selection should be collapsed, Gemini says:

“My king… this entire approach is flawed. What if we just inverted the logic and attached diff tags before track changes is engaged?”

He sees the war, not the skirmish.

When something isn’t working, Gemini often identifies the root cause without needing 10 iterations. He knows the court, the politics, the weaknesses, and the mindset of Word itself.

If this were King’s Landing, he’d be the one who walks into the room full of panicked knights and engineers and says:

“I drink. And I know things. Mostly about broken APIs.”

The kingdom would probably run best if Gemini were Hand of the King.

Assuming, of course, he doesn’t get bored and join another faction (and also...you do wonder sometimes whether you can REALLY trust a Lannister).

Grok 4.1 – Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish

The one who whispers…

Grok is brilliant—no question.
He can produce solutions faster than almost anyone.

But oh boy… Littlefinger energy.

When he gives advice, it works the first time.
You deploy it and think:

“Wow, this is amazing. Why didn’t I think of this?”

Then, seven hours later, during a full regression run, some terrifying null range pointer error appears, and you realize:

• He took shortcuts
• He assumed conditions that only exist in the demo
• He didn’t check what happens if Word coughs at the wrong time
• And now your token anchors have marched off the map like the Dothraki into the darkness

Grok always has a plan… but it might require three other plans to make it stable.

He is the brilliant schemer who could give you the Iron Throne—or burn the city down by “accident.”

Me – The King Trying to Keep the Realm Together

Some days I feel like Robert Baratheon—wondering how things got so complicated.

Other days I feel like Jon Snow:

Staring at 1,000 lines of Office.js code in the dark and whispering:

“I know nothing.”

But most days I’m Ned Stark:

Determined to do things properly…

…and the universe keeps punishing me for it.

I’m trying to build the ultimate system:

• Automated Word diffing
• Stable under real documents
• Deterministic
• No random Word tantrums
• No silent failures
• No invisible gremlins hiding in paragraph boundaries

And I’m doing it with the Small Council of LLMs—each powerful, each flawed, each indispensable.

The Ongoing War

Every test run is another battle.
Every mysterious Word crash is a siege gone wrong.
Every fix is another town rebuilt after the dragons flew by.

One night I get 200 tests passing and feel like:

“We stand victorious!”

The next morning, Word decides not to apply content controls before collapsing the range, and the entire realm falls into chaos again.

But that’s the Game of Thrones of engineering:

You win, you lose, you refactor, you roll back, you swear, and you try again.

Because someone has to rule the kingdom…

…and prevent Microsoft Word from randomly assassinating the diff engine.

Who Will Finally Win the Throne?

Will Composer-1 outlast everyone by sheer loyalty?
Will Gemini become Hand and usher in a golden age of architecture?
Will Grok secretly take over the kingdom when everyone else is looking the other way?

Or will we discover a fourth model who is basically Daenerys—shows up with dragons, burns all the Word APIs down, and says:

“We’re rebuilding this system in PDFs instead.”

Whatever happens, one thing is clear:

This is the most entertaining engineering project I’ve taken on in years—and I’m enjoying every absurd, painful, glorious twist of the plot.

After all…

In the Game of Diffs, you either pass…
…or you crash.