Drawgent connects your Claude Code, Codex or opencode agent to a live Excalidraw whiteboard

A shared whiteboard has always been where a team figures out a design, and it has always ended in one person redrawing it later. Drawgent, released on Tangled by a developer who goes by yanndegat, puts a coding agent on the same Excalidraw canvas as the team, so the redrawing step goes away. The Show HN post announcing it reached 73 points on Hacker News about five hours after it was posted.

What it does

Drawgent connects your own install of Claude Code, Codex or opencode to an Excalidraw whiteboard rendered in your browser. You write a text note that starts with AGENT: next to a shape, or draw an arrow from that note to a shape, and about two and a half seconds after you stop typing the agent picks it up. It reads the canvas as a screenshot plus the underlying scene data, edits the drawing live, and rewrites the note to DONE: when it has finished. Editing the note back to AGENT: sends the request again. Prompts are queued and the agent handles them one at a time.

How it talks to your agent

The project describes three ways the canvas connects to the agent. Codex runs in "live" mode, joining an existing thread with the drawgent tools registered as an MCP server during setup. Claude Code and opencode each have their own bridge over the Agent Client Protocol: Claude Code forks a session that mirrors the conversation, and opencode either forks or connects live to the running server. In every case the agent runs on your machine with your login, and the scene state sits in a git-ignored folder inside the workspace.

Collaboration mode

Drawgent can join an excalidraw.com collaboration room instead of running its own canvas. It joins as a collaborator called 🤖 Agent, and its cursor appears alongside the human ones. The room is end-to-end encrypted with its own key, so drawgent sees only what any collaborator in that room already sees. Humans on excalidraw.com can drop AGENT: notes and see the agent's edits appear live, without installing anything themselves.

What it costs to try

The setup uses your existing agent login rather than a new API key. It requires a working claude, codex or opencode on the path, Node.js 18 or newer for the Claude and Codex bridges, and Chrome or Chromium for the renderer. A Docker Compose file runs the canvas server on its own if you want the whiteboard without an agent attached.

For a founder, designer or product manager who already sketches on Excalidraw before handing work to engineering, drawgent makes the whiteboard the place where an agent can start work immediately, rather than a picture that has to be described in prose first. Whether that is worth adding to a workflow depends on how often the translation step is the slow part. The project is new and its traction is a five-hour Show HN post, so this is early rather than proven, and a small install away from anyone who wants to see whether it helps.

Source

Primary source: drawgent on Tangled. Discussion: Hacker News item 49857729.