[HN Gopher] Tldraw Computer
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Tldraw Computer
Author : duck
Score : 418 points
Date : 2024-12-20 07:42 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (computer.tldraw.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (computer.tldraw.com)
| lolpanda wrote:
| this looks like the workflows in gumloop.com
| akira2501 wrote:
| Give it a dark theme and I'd say the modern Westworld TV
| series.
| forgot_user1234 wrote:
| Why though ?
| corentin88 wrote:
| That might look like a toy, but that kind of remind me the
| Minority Report screen, where you see Tom Cruise moving things
| with a hand-mouse device.
|
| The UI built by Tldraw is different from a chat interface. That
| doesn't mean it's not a good fit to interact with an AI/LLM.
|
| I definitely see this in the hands of kids, just like they are
| great interfaces to code video games without writing a line of
| code.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| IIRC they took VC money a year or so ago?
|
| Interesting product and obviously awesome execution, as
| expected from tldraw... but yeah... seems like a very strange
| departure from what Steve has been building the past few years.
| steveruizok wrote:
| yep, more news on that soon
|
| The core product / pitch is still the same--an SDK for
| whiteboards and other infinite canvas stuff--and that's what
| we monetize through licenses. Computer (and our other demos)
| are basically marketing, R&D, and fun.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Ah I see!
|
| Well if you're looking for fun stuff... could you make a
| tool that lets me easily breadboard [1] an app, and then
| you GenAI it into a low-fidelity clickable prototype?
|
| As always, excellent execution on this, Steve!
|
| [1]:
| https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.3-chapter-04#breadboarding
| 20after4 wrote:
| This is actually a really nice interface for working with
| generative AI.
|
| This seems like it could be really powerful and actually useful.
| attentionmech wrote:
| This can be a good tool to teach kids programming/generative-ai
| ggerules wrote:
| Actually in its present form. It would need to be supervised to
| help teach kids programming.
|
| I just spent the last few hours typing in the specification of
| a Freshman programming project that I use to teach, Rock,
| Paper, Scissors.
|
| Specifying the programming assignment using either Python, C or
| C++, using their parameterization feature. Parameterization is
| very cool by the way!
|
| It would routinely miss putting any headers in for the C or C++
| examples. Once in awhile it would generate actual working code
| in C and C++. But it was all unindented. The same for Python
| also. The Python code had no indenting everytime causing
| indentation errors for the Python environment. I tried many
| different ways of specifying indentation for the text output;
| it didn't work. Possibly b/c of the HTML output being
| generated. It's 90% there, but the user would actually have to
| have some knowledge of the programming language to make sense
| of the errors.
| martypitt wrote:
| 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.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| 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.
| Kiro wrote:
| 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.
| humbugtheman wrote:
| hello it's me Todepond
| delusional wrote:
| Hi Lu
| humbugtheman wrote:
| hi
| humbugtheman wrote:
| Great chat
| crimsoneer wrote:
| Do you somewhere have slides/recordings from the awesome AI
| tinkerers talk you did? Because that's what I had in mind
| when I made this comment and will be way easier than me
| trying to describe it
| dustingetz wrote:
| 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
| gcanyon wrote:
| File > New Shared Project -- and your problem is solved.
| Remember to bookmark your work, since there is no
| login/account/automatic storage.
| steveruizok wrote:
| So sorry Dustin. We'll have a new version of tldraw with user
| accounts in a few weeks that should improve things, but until
| then please no one clear your browser storage
| dustingetz wrote:
| a clear docstring would be great
| chris_pie wrote:
| And ("vanilla") tldraw supports subpixel font rendering, unlike
| most of their competition (for example excalidraw or Miro).
| bloomingkales wrote:
| How?
| vjeux wrote:
| We actually intentionally round it to the nearest pixel in
| excalidraw because otherwise the font tends to be blurry. We
| may want to reconsider.
| creativenolo wrote:
| Isn't it just DOM translated?
| vc4 wrote:
| Such a nice visual spin to interact with LLMs, great work by the
| team
| petargyurov wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| petargyurov wrote:
| Hey! To be honest, I am not sure my feedback would be very
| valuable. I'm probably your worst type of user -- perma free
| plan -- simply because I'd only use your tool sporadically. I
| don't do literature reviews that often, but often enough to
| think about using a tool like this I suppose.
|
| I totally get it though, it's a difficult thing to balance.
| If I was doing lit review and deep research daily 6.99 is an
| amazing deal.
| predictand wrote:
| I am still happy to hear from a fellow user! Feel free to
| ping me if you ever have feature recommendations or
| suggestions.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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.
| hhh wrote:
| Excalidraw is also _mostly_ open source
|
| https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw
| benrutter wrote:
| I might be scanning and missing something, but from that it
| looks like the whole repo is MIT license?
| steveruizok wrote:
| 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)
| EgoIncarnate wrote:
| 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._
| agumonkey wrote:
| Ah, I didn't expect that this soon
| amne wrote:
| tldr: needs email to play with it
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I think its decent considering it requires money , and even
| chatgpt in its early stages didn't allow for anonymous chats /
| unlimited chats and I remember going on all these chatgpt
| clones becuase of that.
|
| I also understand the hilarious spin that you added considering
| tldr (too long didn't read) lmao. but still its worth your
| email.
|
| Crazy how I realised that tldr meme after I had written the
| first paragraph
| steveruizok wrote:
| believe it or not I picked the tldraw name because I already
| owned the domain (I'd bought it for a different project
| called telestrator) and it was only weeks later when Francois
| Laberge complimented the clever name that I noticed the
| portmanteau
| emptysongglass wrote:
| I'd appreciate if you didn't consider Firefox Relay emails
| as disposable email. The Firefox folks specifically have
| tried to make Relay anti-abuse.
|
| It's an unkind thing to do to your prospective users.
|
| From Bleeping computer's coverage the last time someone
| tried to dump Relay in with a disposable email blocklist:
|
| > Back in November 2021, Firefox Relay's team lead had
| requested the maintainer of a separate burner email list,
| "burner-email-providers" to exempt the particular domain
| form the blocklist:
|
| > "We are operating Relay with a number of features that I
| think mitigate the risks that these aliases pose,"
| Mozilla's privacy and security engineer Luke Crouch
| explained in November.
|
| > Firstly, if a @mozmail.com alias is disabled by the user,
| any emails sent to the alias are not bounced back but
| instead discarded with a 404 error message returned by the
| service's HTTP webook, stated Crouch.
|
| Secondly, he explained, the anti-abuse protections built
| into Relay limit free users to a total of five aliases, and
| further rate-limit premium customers so they cannot abuse
| the service by creating large-scale throw-away aliases for,
| say, automated signups to web services.
|
| > With that reasoning, mozmail.com was swiftly removed from
| that blocklist. And it appears, the creators of
| "disposable-email-domains" have also honored the clause,
| for now.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I am sorry but I am confused.
|
| To whom exactly are you talking to?
| emptysongglass wrote:
| To Steve, who has answered.
| steveruizok wrote:
| Oh sorry, that's a toggle in Clerk (our auth provider),
| it doesn't provide granularity around which are
| disposable and which aren't. I'll take a look and see
| whether there's anything I can do short of turning off
| that feature.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Thank you! Appreciate the transparency. It's helpful to
| know it originates elsewhere.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Excalidraw is free & open source software though, which IMO
| makes it deserve more attention
| rozenmd wrote:
| tldraw's source is available fwiw
|
| https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw
| rapnie wrote:
| Oof, source available, that is an oversight on my end. Or was
| there a recent license change? Off the shortlist then,
| unfortunately.
| rapnie wrote:
| Yep, license change from Apache 2.0 in December 2023.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Have any forks from the FOSS version picked up any
| traction?
| orlp wrote:
| What do you base this on? The main repository
| (https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw) states it's MIT
| and this has been unchanged for 5 years.
|
| EDIT: I guess you were talking about tldraw rather than
| excalidraw.
| sagaro wrote:
| 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?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I don't know maybe it was a skill issue from my side 2 -4
| months ago , I felt as if I was forced to sign up back then
|
| I am sorry I guess then for this comment , excalidraw also
| works great but I still just like tldraw because of how
| familiar I have become of this interface.
|
| Shame that the licensing of tldraw is less permittive than
| excalidraw but I guess I am just a little bit okay with it
| considering its still open source and though I maybe wrong I
| had read the license , and it seems that it was focusing way
| more on that you had to have the name of tldraw / packaging
| of tldraw / copyright
|
| here is the license restrictions Not to
| disable, hide, remove, or alter the Watermark. Not to
| disable, change, or interfere with the license key validation
| process that governs the display of the Watermark.
| Not to remove any copyright or other notices from the
| Software. Not to make the Software available under a
| license that supersedes or negates the effect of this
| License. Not to distribute the Software or
| modifications of the Software as a standalone product, but
| only as part of another application. To include a
| verbatim copy of this License in any distribution of the
| Software. To comply with tldraw's trademark policy.
| boomskats wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| britannio wrote:
| It was a cool thing... I expected a hacky demo that'd fall
| apart mid-way but it held up. The Macintosh SE in the office
| was cool too.
| boomskats wrote:
| Ha yeah, that was the same thing! The night it rained
| sideways.
|
| So this is the demo people were talking about at the end of
| the night! I was quite annoyed I missed it, makes sense now.
| I think I was nerding out over current-gen HIDs while eyeing
| up their very tastefully equipped coffee station (ozone
| roasters ftw)
| zanderwohl wrote:
| I agree. Looking at this, it seems to be exactly how I want
| to use LLMs. Describe a small transformation of data I don't
| want to work out now, connect it to other components. As the
| needs become more-defined, replace each part with a faster,
| more-reliable, well-defined data transformation. I could
| actually see developing a system this way...
| nightowl_games wrote:
| Tell us more about what you saw?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| This would be fantastic as a component for versioning, testing,
| editing and sharing both simpeler prompting and """agentic ai"""
| systems!
|
| I see just an email signup thing, can't figure out if i can slap
| this onto the ai backends I'm building
| delusional wrote:
| So this is what Arroost was leading into.
| bentt wrote:
| TLDraw is fascinating, but I feel like when I see them tweet cool
| stuff it isn't actually in the app. This is likely me being dumb
| but since it happened a couple times now whenever I see their
| posts I assume the same.
| arb_ wrote:
| I think they tweet prototypes and then don't ship most
| prototypes. Seems reasonable to me, otherwise you have instant
| bloat.
| steveruizok wrote:
| Yeah we did a lot of work this summer that was really far out,
| maybe too far out, and didn't come together as a product. We
| shipped a lot of it in teach.tldraw.com though. Computer is
| exciting to me in part because it feels both very weird and
| also intelligible as a piece of software.
| tholdem wrote:
| 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.
| stared wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm new to this and maybe a bit dense.
|
| Is the magic here making a flow chart / workflow where sample
| data is generated to make it easier to visualize and you can
| update and see the results?
| ffdixon1 wrote:
| 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.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I'm not 100% sure why, but this is incredibly compelling to me as
| a fun developer-y thing. I _want_ to use this.
| steveruizok wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| steveruizok wrote:
| Not immediately! This might turn out to be just a great demo,
| might be something worth continuing with, really depends on
| how the next few weeks go. Either way there might be
| something we can do with the developer community around data
| endpoints in the short term.
| pipes wrote:
| Can someone tell me what this does? Is it draw a diagram and it
| will automatically implement it in code?
| tantalor wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| Reminds me of Orange Data Mining but with a nicer UI.
| calebm wrote:
| How's it different than draw.io?
| creativenolo wrote:
| One is a diagram tool, one is innovation the uses a diagram
| tool.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Didn't expect the blog post to go to a Google Gemini page:
| https://ai.google.dev/showcase/tldraw
| all2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| all2 wrote:
| No industry standard format that I know of. I presume I'll
| have to come up with my own (some kind of typed JSON,
| probably).
|
| At the end of the line these are just function definitions --
| a black box that takes well defined inputs and produces well
| defined outputs, as well as calling out side-effects (I
| suppose these could just be more outputs).
| purple-leafy wrote:
| Seems very cool
| noduerme wrote:
| 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". I love how easy this was to snap
| together! https://computer.tldraw.com/t/hx16RhvffEnYnap9rBfBah
| EgoIncarnate wrote:
| Tldraw computer - how does it work?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn1De5uwrlY _Steve from tldraw
| gives a tour of how tldraw.computer handles AI generation on the
| canvas, including a peek at prompts and models._
| noduerme wrote:
| Question: Is there any way to induce randomness? Given two lists,
| instructions that say "Pick a random item from each list"
| consistently returns the same two items.
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