New Open-Source Tool 'Drawgent' Puts AI Coding Agents on a Live Excalidraw Canvas

A new open-source project circulating on Hacker News describes a tool called Drawgent, which aims to connect AI coding agents directly to a live, collaborative drawing canvas. According to the project's repository on Tangled, a git-hosting platform, Drawgent is distributed as a single Rust binary that serves an Excalidraw editor, preserves the drawing scene, and links it to a user's own installation of Claude Code, Codex or opencode.

The tool is built around a small set of commands. A "setup" command checks for an installed agent CLI and its login status, prepares what the project calls an ACP bridge to drive the user's own agent binary, locates or installs a headless Chrome instance, and writes a configuration file to the user's local settings directory. A separate "up" command starts a new agent session tied to the current workspace, while an "up --attach" option lists sessions already running, whether that is a forked Claude session over ACP, a live opencode session reached through its HTTP API, or a live Codex session managed through a command the project refers to as "codex queue."

Once running, Drawgent presents a chat panel alongside the canvas, allowing an agent to leave notes directly on the drawing. The project also describes MCP-based canvas tools with a vision component, using the headless Chrome instance to render the canvas so the agent can effectively "see" it, and a client for excalidraw.com rooms that uses AES-GCM encryption alongside socket.io and Firestore for real-time collaboration.

On the build side, the repository includes a Makefile for producing static musl builds, a Nix development shell configured for the fish shell, and an optional Docker image intended for server-only deployments. The commit history attributes co-authorship to "Claude Opus 5.5," an attribution that has not been independently verified.

Because the material available for this report comes from limited, partially garbled text extracted from the source page, several details remain unconfirmed. It is not yet clear who built Drawgent, when it was first published, or how widely it has been adopted. Readers interested in trying the tool, or in verifying specifics such as installation requirements and self-hosted "knot" clone URLs referenced in the repository, should consult the original Tangled listing directly before relying on any single secondhand account, including this one.