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Comment by rawgabbit | Hacker News Reader

TLDR: Canvas is a new side by side mode in ChatGPT.

You can use it for improving documents. You interact with ChatGPT on the left panel. You see the document on the right panel including the editorial comments by ChatGPT.

You can also use it for running and debugging Python code. You interact with ChatGPT on the left panel. You see the code and the console messages/errors/output on the right.

Demo video url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ0ImE41pVs

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Sounds like the Claude artifact panel?

It’s very similar, but the big difference is that canvas lets you select a specific line/paragraph/word/etc and “talk” to just that selection.

On the flipside, it only shows formatted text, it won’t render anything if you’re working with code.

I've been using Cursor for these writing use cases for a while (markdown, not code). Select part, ask for edits. It's quite handy. This actually sounds useful.

Yes.

> You can also use it for running and debugging Python code.

Not limited to Python code.

It can only run python code, but it can write other languages

Though note that it runs python code via web assembly, on the client's device, using pyodide. Pretty easy way to avoid DOS attacks or even any resource usage on their servers.

Ostensibly they could add other platforms/languages that have wasm implementations.

I wonder if the data analysis tool will switch to using the same backend in the future

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