Whiteboard gives AI coding agents a visual canvas

A new open-source IDE called Whiteboard lets you and your AI agents visualize codebases together on an interactive canvas.

Whiteboard (YC W26) hit Hacker News this week, pulling in 181 points. The MIT-licensed desktop app connects to tools like Claude Code and Codex. It gives agents an SDK to draw architecture diagrams, record decision logs, and map out changes directly on your screen.

Why it matters: Reading raw diffs from AI coders gets exhausting fast. Whiteboard uses a Rust-powered parser to turn large functions into simple pseudocode while hiding routine test updates. When you click a sequence diagram or an agent trace quote, the app jumps straight to the matching line of code.

Know this: Whiteboard runs locally on your machine and uses a fork of VS Code under the hood. It comes with a few early limits: you cannot edit files inside the app yet, and multi-repo support is still minimal.

Think of it less like a traditional text editor and more like a visual map for reviewing what your agent just built.