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  • One other option, if you're an obsidian user is, just add the excalidraw plugin there, and then you can ask your agent to just create excalidraw diagrams as needed.

    Definitely Opus 5.5 via claude code has no problems generating Excalidraw images with no additional software, just based on conversation.

    by raesene9
  • What frustrates me about many projects is it's never been easier to just make a quick video or image or gif and put it in the README to show what the value is. This was at least somewhat complex before AI but now you can just paste an image and have the AI put it in your README.

    I guess the frustrating bit is that the readme is 100s of lines long. AI is already saving you so much time on a project like this but you still make me clone and spin it up if i want to see it for real.

    I get that open source is a gift and you’re not obliged to do anything I say but please consider taking the extra few minutes on your next project.

    by AM1010101
  • I think many folks are underutilizing or underestimate the power of HTML.

    There's been a few of these things on the front page lately. Including false "whiteboards" that are DSL abstractions over things like React Flow...

    I've done quite a bit with Excalidraw MCP and the models had to deal with a lot of JSON data and estimating/computing with bounding box and pixel point numbers.

    But with HTML, the agents get the natural semantics/styling capabilities and basically zero abstraction. The recent models can draw exceptionally well any form of logical/conceptual/flow diagram.

    by ramoz
  • Posted this somewhere else aswell but I've had good success with https://whiteboard-mcp.com - it seems to work better than other free alternatives for things like architecture diagram creation
    by bad_haircut72
  • This is crazy. My claude chess stuff is (edit: was) currently near yours on the front page and noticed your post. I have a project very close than yours that I hesitated to share. From a quick glance, we went for a similar approach. I just open sourced it so that you can compare implementation notes. https://github.com/brumar/whiteboard-agents . It's not thoroughly tested but can be interesting to check.
    by brumar
  • YMMV, but the value I get from producing a diagram is derived from the thinking. Thinking about what I'm trying to draw leads to understanding about where my/my team's knowledge is poorer, what assumptions we're making, etc.
    by 4ndrewl
  • I've had a fairly thorough exploration of how I can give my agent a whiteboard so we can work on architectures together. To my surprise, current solutions (including Excalidraw) were not good enough and didn't deliver what I wanted. I ended up finding Mermaid to be the most agent-friendly medium and coded an Obsidian plugin for it. It works okay; we can work on the same doc while I bring my own AI agent, and we can brainstorm together. https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/mermaid-relay
    by armanj
  • Excalidraw offers their own open source first party MCP endpoint[0] and server[1]:

    [0]https://mcp.excalidraw.com

    [1]https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw-mcp

    by seemaze

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