Show HN: Whiteboard (YC W26) – An open-source IDE for thoughtful software design
Hello! We’re Sid, Alex, Ketan, and Milan. We’re building Whiteboard ( https://whiteboard.dev.fast/ ), an open-source desktop app where humans and agents can architect software together in a common workspace. Here’s our repo: https://github.com/devdotfast/whiteboard . We were missing the feeling of a “whiteboard session” with another dev where you leave with a deep understanding of a system, so we…
Four college friends, Sid, Alex, Ketan, and Milan, co-founded Whiteboard (YC W26), an open-source IDE designed to facilitate thoughtful software design through collaboration. Their inspiration stemmed from their frustration with the lack of a cohesive "whiteboard session" experience when working with AI agents to architect software.
Whiteboard provides a desktop application where humans and agents can design software together within a shared workspace. It integrates with existing tools like Claude Code, Codex, and offers developers an SDK to draw on an in-app canvas to describe their work. The app begins with an HTML-based MVP but has evolved to address limitations, such as connecting visualizations to code and providing a semantic, AST-aware diff viewer.
Key features include:
- Direct navigation from visualizations like sequence diagrams or entity relationship diagrams to underlying code
- VSCode keybindings and Language Server Protocol (LSP) support for seamless coding experience
- A customizable WASM-based plugin system for whiteboarding
- A Decision Log tool to track agent-made decisions and trace requirements to implementation
- An optional hosted web version with trajectory storage and multiplayer review features
Whiteboard has been adopted by companies like Salesforce and Modal as a review tool for architecture or specification changes. It helps users review their own AI-generated code and assess changes made by others. The app is released under an MIT license, with the source code available at https://github.com/devdotfast/whiteboard and available for installation on MacOS and Linux at https://install.dev.fast.
The team's goal is to improve the collaboration and understanding of complex software systems while mitigating the 'cognitive debt' that can accumulate as more automated code changes are merged. Feedback and contributions are welcomed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49833867.
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