Tldraw Computer

[petargyurov]

If I can plug my own API key into this and/or run Llama locally, that'd be great.

It reminds me of a tool I saw recently called Heuristica [0]. Would like to try it but I don't like being tied to a subscription and the free plan seems quite limited if I can't even plug my own key in. Don't see why this can't do what Heuristica does! :)

[0] https://www.heuristi.ca/

[predictand]

Hey there! Thanks for mentioning Heuristica. I would love to find out how to make the free plan for Heuristica to be more permissive (without destroying the incentive to subscribe for willing users). Feel free to send me your suggestions.

At one point, I also worked on making it work with a personal API key. However, this added a lot of complexity. It felt like I was building and maintaining two separate branches of the same app, so I had to put the idea on hold. I might revisit it in the future.

[boomskats]

I ended up at Tldraw's London office a few weeks ago for a thing, and I remember afterwards being like 'ahh, now I understand how they end up just casually doing random cool shit and attracting the kind of talent they do'.

They should be extremely proud of the culture they've managed to foster and I genuinely hope to see them succeed as a business.

[samwillis]

Very much this! I was also at a thing at their office a few weeks ago (some thing? "Local Thirst"), and Steve gave a demo of this. It is incredible.

I've joked before that the last generation of human machine interfaces ware invented at Xerox park, and the next generation is being invented at TLDraw of Finsbury Park. But it's not really a joke, I genuinely believe it.

[nightowl_games]

Tell us more about what you saw?

[martypitt]

I got to see this demo'd at a conference in Sydney recently, and it's really cool.

It's not super serious, but it's not meant to be -- it's not pitching to be your enterprise AI strategy. However, even though it's presented in a playful way, I suspect it's quite powerful, and expect The Internets will build some cool stuff atop it.

It's a fun and creative way to explore playing with LLM's, and it's brilliantly executed! Happy to see it here on HN.

[tholdem]

I want to use Tldraw as a simpler alternative to Figma. I want to drag and drop Web Components (or React components) into the canvas to play around with different UI ideas. Maybe a built in library of Shadcn components I could mock up an UI with.

[layer8]

After reading the blog post, I don’t really understand what this is. The blog post seems to go out of its way to only make allusions and not explain what this actually is and does.

[moralestapia]

Seems to be a node-based LLM-powered "computer". IMO the paradigm seems quite powerful.

The video on their homepage gives a good idea of how it will work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1016UnJIgA

My only refrain would be that it uses Google's Gemini, a very poor choice of an AI model collection.

[ffdixon1]

I'd like to echo the impressiveness of tldraw. At the BigBlueButton project, an open source virtual classroom, we built tldraw into the core. It has saved us countless development hours as we stopped trying to build our own whiteboard and instead stood on tldraw's (very) wide shoulders. We've never looked back.

[ALittleLight]

I'd love a "Code" component where you could enter arbitrary code. After following the tutorials I asked myself "What would I like to make?" And I imagined a tweet-bot - grab headlines from Wiki news (or somewhere), combine with an instruction to generate text and another couple instructions to generate an image, post to twitter (or bluesky).

This seems easy enough if I have a code component that could execute arbitrary code. I could just write a couple small component (take API key, text, post to twitter/search wikinews) and add them to the workflow. If the components I needed were generalizable I could share them on some kind of community repository - so the next person who needed a "Post to twitter" component wouldn't even need to rewrite it.

[diggan]

Looks like an interesting project for sure, but they make it really hard to try out. At first, this submission links to a blog post with information and in the middle, a bunch of demos laid out in a grid.

I clicked on one of them, which took me to the actual app. When trying to click the button to generate something, it asks me to login/sigup. Fine, I signup. Then once finishing the sign up, I land on some sort of index page with tutorials and "my projects", but not at the demo I first wanted to see.

So I go back to HN, to this submission, click on the link but it still takes me to this index view instead of the blog post/page I first read. I just wanted to see what happened when I clicked the button inside the app...

[steveruizok]

That redirect is a bug for sure, thanks for pointing it out. We have all those examples on the index page for logged in users but I can see how it would seem like they’d disappeared.

[qwertygnu]

I found the demos just under My Projects under the Examples section

[stared]

I was thinking of developing something similar, but it ended up being one of the thousands of ideas that never end with a line of code. I'm glad to see it here.

Visual programming is a tempting idea I love. It rarely works, but this might be the case.

I think there is a lot of room for AI UIs - between chats (the simplest and most prevalent) and arbitrary code (even if it is "just API calls", it is only people with at least some software inclination).

One thing I am keeping track of is WordWare (https://www.wordware.ai/), which makes it easy to create a sequence of operations. It feels like an "Excel formulas of AI".

Yet, I like the visual, graph-based approach of Tldraw.

[crimsoneer]

Even "vanilla" tldraw is super cool as a clean, functional, open-source html5 whiteboard, and the team have absolutely been killing it in their comms and use of LLMs. I honestly think they might be some of the most innovative people around when it comes to really novel UI for LLMs. Also, Todepond is just very cool.

[dustingetz]

does the cloud product’s “new project” button still trash your saved documents with one click behind a docstring something like “make sure you have saved your stuff before making a new project” where what they meant is “our cloud product does not save your projects to the cloud, it is in local storage actually and you can only have one project at a time so the new project button actually overwrites your old one, so when we say ‘save’ we actually mean export your stuff to a json file and save to local disk!! so you can re-import it back into the product later from local disk and overwrite it back!!!!” I did my VC seed pitch deck in tldraw along with a bunch of product mocks, ask me how i know this

[chris_pie]

And ("vanilla") tldraw supports subpixel font rendering, unlike most of their competition (for example excalidraw or Miro).

[Kiro]

I didn't know Todepond worked on tldraw. That's cool.

> really novel UI for LLMs

Are you referring to Tldraw Computer or something else? Don't get me wrong, it looks really nice but not that different from other graph representations of LLM workflows, including live updates in the nodes themselves.

[pipes]

Can someone tell me what this does? Is it draw a diagram and it will automatically implement it in code?

[tantalor]

users create workflows from blocks of text, images, and instructions. When run, information flows from one component to the next, with the output of each generation serving as the input to the next, creating powerful processes that branch, loop, and iterate to produce outputs

It's Yahoo! Pipes for AI.

[EagnaIonat]

Reminds me of Orange Data Mining but with a nicer UI.

[20after4]

This is actually a really nice interface for working with generative AI.

This seems like it could be really powerful and actually useful.

[noduerme]

This is such a cool toy!

I'm curious how the internal prompting works in certain cases, and whether there's any way to customize a particular module's default or hidden prompt. Particularly with speech. I was trying to get it to sing a made-up Christmas carol, with generate lyrics and chords. I tried a bunch of different ways, but at best the speech module would only read it out. In one funny case, the speech module added on its own beforehand: "a spoken-word piece".

I made a "Cuisine Synthesizer". [Edit: Updated to "Fusion Food Truck Simulator"]. I love how easy this was to snap together! https://computer.tldraw.com/p/m15giebhYxD6RfWmho7R5J

[steveruizok]

Hey, Steve here from tldraw.

We had a bunch of fun putting this together so I'm really happy to see folks enjoying it. I'm not sure where the project is going but I've been waking up for weeks with a fresh "oh christ, we could do ___", so that's exciting.

Ask me anything!

[zamfi]

Hi Steve! Super cool implementation.

Any chance you’ll make the source available?

There are about 50 extensions I’d make to it if I could! (And I’m sure I’m not alone.)

[ChrisArchitect]

Didn't expect the blog post to go to a Google Gemini page: https://ai.google.dev/showcase/tldraw

[Imustaskforhelp]

THIS is it.

I have been using tldraw with one of my friends or even generally when my whiteboard marker goes down and I wish to draw.

Seriously tldraw makes sharing whiteboards so easier as compared to excalidraw and others.

TLDRAW deserves more attention than excalidraw and I watched its demo video and

holy moly , this is so crazy , the fact that this can create semi websites and etc. feels so cool , definitely going to try it

[forty]

Excalidraw is free & open source software though, which IMO makes it deserve more attention

[sagaro]

In excalidraw I just have to click share session and anyone with that url can see my whiteboard and interact with it. I get tldraw has much more features etc. but how exactly is it making sharing whiteboard so easier compared to excalidraw?

[satvikpendem]

This is basically ComfyUI but for LLMs, is that right? I know tldraw as the open source Excalidraw competitor but this is an interesting product as well.

[steveruizok]

Excalidraw is more open source than we are at tldraw! We're both source available on GitHub but Excalidraw is MIT while the newer versions of tldraw are a kind of watermark-ware. (We still have an older MIT version available but not in development)

[hhh]

Excalidraw is also mostly open source

https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw

[EgoIncarnate]

TLDraw relicensed about a year ago. It is under a permissive license, but no longer strictly open source ('watermark-ware").

https://tldraw.dev/ FAQ: Is the tldraw SDK open source? Our license is not exactly Open Source but you can view the source code on GitHub. We accept contributions from the community and work in public.

[all2]

Steve,

I'd like to know if I can use the SDK to build workflow/process diagrams that specify inputs, outputs, and side effects (ie, this process creates a pile of logs or documentation) and then export a process specification for use in another application.

My specific use case is process mapping and quality systems implementation in a hardware engineering setting.

[steveruizok]

That sounds really useful. There's no export yet here apart from images and it isn't something I've thought about much so far. Are there standard formats for these types of workflows?

[gcanyon]

I'm not 100% sure why, but this is incredibly compelling to me as a fun developer-y thing. I want to use this.

[noduerme]

Anyone else experiencing projects reverting back to their default state? I'm not sure if this is just after publishing... two of the cool things I did yesterday (including one linked here) were wiped out today and simply show the default new project.