The Livelymerge Experiment
Livelymerge is a system designed to merge and reconcile conflicting changes in structured documents, such as JSON data, by letting users visually inspect, understand, and resolve differences interactively. The experiment explores how to make merging more human-friendly and less error-prone compared to traditional text-based diffs.
Background
Ink & Switch is a research lab that explores new tools for creative work, especially around digital documents and collaboration. Livelymerge is one of their experimental projects. It tackles a familiar pain point: when two people edit the same document and then try to merge their changes, tools like Google Docs or Git show you text-level differences but not *why* the changes were made — the reasoning, the back-and-forth, the context. Livelymerge prototypes a system that records more of that collaborative context (discussions, decisions, alternatives considered) and replays it in a "lively" way, so the person merging can understand not just what changed but what motivated the change. The project is squarely in the "digital tools for thought" space, similar to work by researchers like Andy Matuschak or the Dynamicland group. The article describes the experiment's design goals, the technical approach, and lessons learned from building it.