This Free App Lets You and AI Design Software on One Whiteboard
A shared canvas where AI shows its thinking before it writes any code.
Whiteboard is an open-source, MIT-licensed desktop app where humans and agents can architect software together in a common workspace. It plugs into the tools you already use — Claude Code, Codex, and others — and gives your agent an SDK to draw on an in-app canvas to describe its work. Clicking on visualizations like a sequence diagram, an entity relationship diagram, or a quote from the agent's trace jumps you to the underlying code, with VSCode keybindings and LSP support out of the box. Instead of noisy raw diffs, it includes a semantic, AST-aware diff viewer written in Rust, which by default summarizes large added functions as pseudocode and collapses or hides unit tests and documentation changes — all customizable via a WASM-based plugin system. It runs against your local checkouts, with a hosted product for teams planned and everything always remaining self-hostable. According to the article, anonymous telemetry does not include your code, diffs, Whiteboard text, prompts, or model output, and you can turn telemetry off at any time. Known limitations: you can't currently edit files in Whiteboard, working across multiple repos in a single review isn't well supported, and updates made after a review is shared don't appear for others unless you re-share.
- Whiteboard is free, open-source software that puts you and your AI coding helper on one shared canvas.
- Clicking a diagram takes you straight to the real code, and a custom viewer hides boring changes so you only see what matters.
- It runs on your own computer and doesn't send your code anywhere — but you can't edit files in it yet, and there's no Windows version.
Why It Matters
If AI writes your code, this makes checking its work faster — before mistakes reach customers.