If only this tool came out before I discovered the ballerina programming language (https://ballerina.io/). Otherwise I am inline with the language <-> uml like definition ballerina statically provides without llm usage.
Oh WOW, cool to see a technique that'll be everywhere in 12 months (the fake pen drawing animations + streaming diagrams as they're produced) first be announced. Do we still do "First!" comments, y'all?
[EDIT: you need to put "only for macOS" in way more prominent places, all over -- that offends my soul greatly and may Linus frown upon you all]
This all looks really solid. That said, two remarks:
1. The integration with OS LSPs is quite fun and commendable. Is it possible that the diagrams might get their own LSP, someday? Or is better just staying as direct TS callsites?
2. The choice of the word "IDE" seems like it might get you in trouble, given the small "cannot edit files" detail. Any comments on the decision there, as opposed to, say... "brainstorming tool"? Or hell, "[architectonic] harness"?
3. The psuedocode "semantic diff" thing is an incredible idea, wow. Props there.
4. This language kinda concerns me: "how the requirements that you set were implemented". In my highly-arbitrary development flow, it ideally goes `idea -> spec/reqs -> plan -> test -> impl -> eval -> land -> review`, and this kind of tool seems explicitly targeted towards just the second and third with some partial coverage of their neighbors on either side. More concretely: by adding implementation, don't you lose a powerful specificity selling point and now have to compete with all full harnesses?
5. Suggesting "GPT-6 Luna and Claude Opus 5.5" is presumably a typo? Cause the equivelant of Opus 5.5 is Astra, and even then not really.
1. Yeah, we've thought about this too - at the minimum, we're going to implement a vibe-codeable extension system so that you can add your own diagram types without rebuilding the app. definitely hopeful for some sort of common schema or lsp-shaped thing in the future
2. this is a good point and is something we've considered and struggled with. we ultimately settled on the term 'IDE' because we've found that most people use vscode to review code nowadays, almost exclusively (so it makes it a bit easier to draw the comp in your mind). we're also strongly considering adding an editing feature, but not sure what the exact shape of it is, so decided to go in favor of not shipping it yet - editing tends towards a conductor / superset shape of product. maybe we could try "canvas" instead of "ide" or something? will mull it over more.
4. Yeah, this is definitely tricky. This is why we didn't end up shipping edits as part of this release. Part of the solution here, we think, is tighter integration with the "spec" part of the lifecycle - where whiteboard makes it easier to understand if a spec (like a formal proof) is extensible, generalizable, etc. will mull on this more.
5. yes that's a typo! we're fixing right now - we meant "GPT 6 Sol" (basically, fast TPS, don't need the limits of intelligence really).
Edit: we do have a Fedora Linux build out if that's what you use! releasing stuff on every distro requires some care, so please let us know what you'd want to see it on (re: appimage lol)
Edit 2: (5) is fixed! thank you
There are a lot of emerging tools like this for which we will need a name. A similar one I randomly came across (https://github.com/Maksim-Burtsev/merl) calls itself a "Code Navigator."
Along similar lines, I also don't know what we're calling tools like T3 or Superset. They're basically harnesses for harnesses.
hmm - those tools are great, but I don't think orchestrator / ADE is quite right either, since this is explicitly not opinionated about where your coding agent is living.
Whiteboard is targeted at almost the opposite problem of the ADE (which is targeted to context switching) - having a dedicated tool to help you understand & participate in the development process in places where humans are high leverage.
This is definitely getting at least some things right about how we work with agents today, specifically that we often work at the architecture level, and we need a better alternative to the current Plan Mode offered by coding agents to efficiently architect software at a high level, which is more visual and offers better back-and-forth incrementation with the agent than simply "reject final plan with X message".
From the website demos i definitely think this is a clean interface, although I don't know how much better this is compared to some simple custom Mermaid format, which the agent can write as artifact files and present to users. Zooming out, this app seems like 1 feature (a MCP with a GUI attached to it) rather than an entire product.
Also, I don't know if asking the agent to write specific code changes into the plan is a good idea. I think maybe that a "plan -> approve -> write code" would let the agent write higher quality code than "plan which contains code -> approve". But maybe you can make it work when combined with some specific prompting marking the code as clearly work-in-progress and subject to change, and that the agent should surface any parts implemented differently relative to the plan to the user, etc.
1. "is this a feature" - it could be! in fact, we will expose this as an MCP UI next so that you can view the info directly in Codex Desktop or Superset/Conductor/Emdash for example. that aside, we found that the big things that matter for us are: (1) good code navigation (diagram/spec -> code), (2) beautiful diff viewing, and (3) visualizing agent traces as they connect to code. we found that these problems were hard enough, and enough folks that were using platforms that didn't easily map to these requirements - e.g. TUIs like claude code - that a dedicated product that was just focused on these problems exclusively makes sense.
2. "using whiteboard for plan mode": hmm, i think our wires are crossed a bit here. how people mostly use whiteboard today is:
plan -> approve -> agent codes -> use whiteboard to explain the code.
(or just omit the plan phase as a formal artifact -> just omit a plan + code together, like a golang design draft [A]).
we are exploring an explicit "put the plan in whiteboard first" mode (there's a scratchpad feature that's experimental right now), but it's definitely not ready for prime time yet.
free, oss, and local-only right now! we are working on a hosted solution but honestly aren't sure yet; we mostly made this for ourselves to fix our own gripes with agentic coding :)
yes, totally, this is a legitimate concern and i hate this too as a dev. we made the choice to build on top of vscode for the mvp so that the code navigation experience would be normal / seamless (and hopefully, devoid of slop).
as a comparison, vanilla cursor / vscode is ~1GB and zed is ~400Mb.
in the future we will definitely rewrite this app as fully native and get it way, way down. in the meantime, we're working to get the size down in other ways (e.g. our diff viewer can definitely be optimized - it's 138Mb, yikes)
I did, for what it's worth, spend a painfully long amount of time designing this website, but unfortunately none of us are great frontend devs, so we lean on the models here for sure (definitely am working on getting better at frontend dev).
we've put in a lot of time and attention into the app especially and hope it shows in the details - e.g. the diff viewer, the rendering animations - we want development to feel human again while still enjoying the speed boost of agents
[EDIT: you need to put "only for macOS" in way more prominent places, all over -- that offends my soul greatly and may Linus frown upon you all]
This all looks really solid. That said, two remarks:
1. The integration with OS LSPs is quite fun and commendable. Is it possible that the diagrams might get their own LSP, someday? Or is better just staying as direct TS callsites?
2. The choice of the word "IDE" seems like it might get you in trouble, given the small "cannot edit files" detail. Any comments on the decision there, as opposed to, say... "brainstorming tool"? Or hell, "[architectonic] harness"?
3. The psuedocode "semantic diff" thing is an incredible idea, wow. Props there.
4. This language kinda concerns me: "how the requirements that you set were implemented". In my highly-arbitrary development flow, it ideally goes `idea -> spec/reqs -> plan -> test -> impl -> eval -> land -> review`, and this kind of tool seems explicitly targeted towards just the second and third with some partial coverage of their neighbors on either side. More concretely: by adding implementation, don't you lose a powerful specificity selling point and now have to compete with all full harnesses?
5. Suggesting "GPT-6 Luna and Claude Opus 5.5" is presumably a typo? Cause the equivelant of Opus 5.5 is Astra, and even then not really.
1. Yeah, we've thought about this too - at the minimum, we're going to implement a vibe-codeable extension system so that you can add your own diagram types without rebuilding the app. definitely hopeful for some sort of common schema or lsp-shaped thing in the future
2. this is a good point and is something we've considered and struggled with. we ultimately settled on the term 'IDE' because we've found that most people use vscode to review code nowadays, almost exclusively (so it makes it a bit easier to draw the comp in your mind). we're also strongly considering adding an editing feature, but not sure what the exact shape of it is, so decided to go in favor of not shipping it yet - editing tends towards a conductor / superset shape of product. maybe we could try "canvas" instead of "ide" or something? will mull it over more.
4. Yeah, this is definitely tricky. This is why we didn't end up shipping edits as part of this release. Part of the solution here, we think, is tighter integration with the "spec" part of the lifecycle - where whiteboard makes it easier to understand if a spec (like a formal proof) is extensible, generalizable, etc. will mull on this more.
5. yes that's a typo! we're fixing right now - we meant "GPT 6 Sol" (basically, fast TPS, don't need the limits of intelligence really).
Edit: we do have a Fedora Linux build out if that's what you use! releasing stuff on every distro requires some care, so please let us know what you'd want to see it on (re: appimage lol) Edit 2: (5) is fixed! thank you
Along similar lines, I also don't know what we're calling tools like T3 or Superset. They're basically harnesses for harnesses.
Whiteboard is targeted at almost the opposite problem of the ADE (which is targeted to context switching) - having a dedicated tool to help you understand & participate in the development process in places where humans are high leverage.
maybe also useful: https://x.com/ThePrimeagen/status/2101869827266596973?s=20
From the website demos i definitely think this is a clean interface, although I don't know how much better this is compared to some simple custom Mermaid format, which the agent can write as artifact files and present to users. Zooming out, this app seems like 1 feature (a MCP with a GUI attached to it) rather than an entire product.
Also, I don't know if asking the agent to write specific code changes into the plan is a good idea. I think maybe that a "plan -> approve -> write code" would let the agent write higher quality code than "plan which contains code -> approve". But maybe you can make it work when combined with some specific prompting marking the code as clearly work-in-progress and subject to change, and that the agent should surface any parts implemented differently relative to the plan to the user, etc.
1. "is this a feature" - it could be! in fact, we will expose this as an MCP UI next so that you can view the info directly in Codex Desktop or Superset/Conductor/Emdash for example. that aside, we found that the big things that matter for us are: (1) good code navigation (diagram/spec -> code), (2) beautiful diff viewing, and (3) visualizing agent traces as they connect to code. we found that these problems were hard enough, and enough folks that were using platforms that didn't easily map to these requirements - e.g. TUIs like claude code - that a dedicated product that was just focused on these problems exclusively makes sense.
2. "using whiteboard for plan mode": hmm, i think our wires are crossed a bit here. how people mostly use whiteboard today is:
plan -> approve -> agent codes -> use whiteboard to explain the code.
(or just omit the plan phase as a formal artifact -> just omit a plan + code together, like a golang design draft [A]).
we are exploring an explicit "put the plan in whiteboard first" mode (there's a scratchpad feature that's experimental right now), but it's definitely not ready for prime time yet.
[A] we were heavily influenced by golang's practice of "design drafts" as a way of scaling engineering velocity, e.g.: https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/draft-i... (thanks to Russ Cox, the legend)
AI note taking is a scourge on society and needs to go.
wrote a blog about this if you're interested! https://dev.fast/blog/youre-still-going-to-have-a-job-in-5-y...
/facepalm
as a comparison, vanilla cursor / vscode is ~1GB and zed is ~400Mb.
in the future we will definitely rewrite this app as fully native and get it way, way down. in the meantime, we're working to get the size down in other ways (e.g. our diff viewer can definitely be optimized - it's 138Mb, yikes)
we've put in a lot of time and attention into the app especially and hope it shows in the details - e.g. the diff viewer, the rendering animations - we want development to feel human again while still enjoying the speed boost of agents