I’m in that camp as well. This is an important capability. However, I have a hunch the Codans are up to something far more sustainable and strategically in the platform camp, rather than simply another vendor integration.
To be very clear, I have no inside track - I’m just speculating, but this is likely how it will unfold.
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For more than a year, it’s probable that Codans have been toiling away on an API upgrade. There are numerous areas of the current API that have untenable voids; the big one - how to access the canvas content? From words, to sentences, to paragraphs, and whole sections. These are objects that are currently stranded on an island.
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The Grammarly-like requirement necessitates real-time interaction; as you type, it needs to watch keystroke events unfold without any perceived hesitation. Coda, of course does have an event model because it can count words as we type. As such, we can easily surmise they have the underlying infrastructure for real-time interaction.
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The current Pack architecture involves a synching process which has some latency; this is inadequate for real-time event handling, but I predict this will not be the case for much longer. Soon, there will probably be support for outbound webhooks that may also allow us to call Pack functions with a webhook formula. Imagine …
thisDocument.newWordEvent.myPackFunction(...)Or…
thisDocument.highlightEvent.myPackFunction(...)
Once we see these three milestones unfold, the race will be on. Companies like Grammarly will have the infrastructure required to create a Pack capable of providing its own very clever experience. More importantly, Coda will have paved a very wide super-highway to support vastly more opportunities to make documents more intelligent and capable of assisting authors with real-time enhancements.
Lastly, this likely collection of underpinnings are also important for Coda apps to form tighter bonds that deliver on the promise of machine learning.
Just sayin’ (and speculating)
ps - I also predict we’ll soon see Pack studio capable of running Python code as well as javascript. 