A Pragmatic Approach to Live Collaboration

Hex, a company focused on making data workflows more collaborative, has developed an approach to real-time collaboration called Atomic Operations (AO). Inspired by Figma's hybrid solution, AO breaks down all edits to application state into their smallest atomic parts. This technique allows for easy implementation and compatibility with Hex's existing stack while maintaining control over the application foundations. The main trade-off is that certain types of mutations can be difficult to express as simple last-writer-wins operations, such as live multi-user editing of text strings. However, this limitation is acceptable for Hex since its product uses a cell-based, notebook-style logic UI.

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