Whiteboard Launches as Open-Source IDE for Collaborative Software Design

Sid, Alex, Ketan, and Milan have released Whiteboard, an open-source desktop application designed to allow humans and AI agents to architect software together in a shared workspace. The team, who previously worked as tech leads, developed the tool to address the "cognitive debt" they experienced when maintaining codebases created by agentic coding tools. Whiteboard integrates with existing tools such as Claude Code and Codex, providing an SDK that enables agents to draw on an in-app canvas to describe their work. The application is built on CodeOSS, allowing users to click on visualizations like sequence diagrams or entity relationship diagrams to jump directly to the underlying code with VSCode keybindings and LSP support.

The platform includes a semantic, AST-aware diff viewer written in Rust that filters code changes to show only relevant updates, such as summarizing large added functions as pseudocode. It also features a Decision Log that allows agents to link their autonomous traces to the Whiteboard, helping users understand how specific requirements were implemented. Companies including Salesforce and Modal are currently using Whiteboard as a review tool for architecture or spec-level changes, often combining it with automated code reviewers like Greptile to escalate complex changes for human judgment.

The developers, who are college buddies that quit their jobs before agentic coding became standard, are releasing the desktop app under an MIT license for MacOS and Linux. They plan to eventually charge companies for a hosted web version that includes trajectory storage and multiplayer reviews, while keeping the software self-hostable. The project is available for contribution on GitHub, and the team welcomes feedback from the community.