README

Whiteboard
  an open-source canvas for thoughtful software design
  
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Whiteboard is an open-source desktop app where humans and agents can architect software together in a common workspace.

Whiteboard plugs into the tools you already use - e.g. Claude Code, Codex, etc. – and gives your agent an SDK to draw on an in-app canvas to describe its work.


  


Here’s a 1 min demo video explaining more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChPn3ftULWE

 Quickstart

1. Download Whiteboard and open the app. On macOS
   you can also run brew install --cask devdotfast/tap/whiteboard.
2. Connect Claude Code, Codex, or another coding agent from the welcome screen.
3. Ask your agent to review your current branch against up-to-date main and
   open the result in Whiteboard.

 Guidance

In our experience, Whiteboard works best with models like GPT-6 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5 for their intelligence, cost, and speed tradeoff.

Here are a few example prompts of how to use Whiteboard effectively. We are working hard to make sure the right choices are baked in by default to the system prompt - part of why this system is open source! - but in the meantime:

 For a new API change

 hey, this stack of commits is set up so i can get an [api] to do [objective]

 i'd like to see:

 - proposed api
 - examples
 - motivations for this (if available to you in context/in the repo)

 and then we can dive into implementation + explaining how things worked.

 For a change to add telemetry:

 Can you explain to me the telemetry changes from the newest posthog pr https://github.com/devdotfast/whiteboard/commit/4837e107946e27ebad50c282eb0f2585210d2a35 -- what are we tracking, how can we build good dashboards or product waterfalls from it? what do we do for hangs, errors, crashes etc... use whiteboard

If you see anything you don't like, highlight it in your clipboard and give it your agent, and it can re-draw on the Whiteboard to suit your needs!

 Why does this exist?

 Diagrams that lead to code

Pure HTML tools didn’t provide easy affordances to connect a spec or diagram to code; this is especially tricky since tradeoffs are often only discovered after a first pass at implementation. In Whiteboard, when you click on visualizations like a sequence diagram, an entity relationship diagram, or a quote from the agent’s trace, you can jump to the underlying code directly. When navigating code, you get keybindings and LSP support from VSCode out of the box.

 Semantic diff viewer

Raw diff views can be very noisy, so we wrote a semantic, AST-aware diff viewer in Rust so you can only view the code changes which are relevant to you. We’ve set up some sane defaults: large added functions are summarized as pseudocode, and things like unit tests and documentation changes are collapsed / hidden. This is all customizable with a WASM-based plugin system.

 Decision log

We found it difficult to reason about what s