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Comment by asdev | Hacker News Reader

I think the issue with this type of product is it creates an N+1 source of truth for teams alongside their other tools. Inherently, this will get out of date as a project progresses. You could have an agent update based on changes, but that would likely degrade the design doc/artifact into unintelligible slop which wouldn't be useful in the future. This is a behavioral/structural problem of software design in general, which I don't think can be solved by software. Perhaps if this is mainly focused on collaboration at design time, but then that begs the question if teams will really want this tool versus using Notion, Linear, Google Docs.

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I see this fitting into my workflow more ephemerally. That, or I will use screenshots in some of my existing documentation so it can all rot in one place.

When using an agent for development, I find that I REALLY miss being able to "see" the shape of the code in my head while I work, and I find that I get bombarded with so much information that I cannot keep track of what the code looks like. This has led to me having to get back to people async on questions they have on a call, etc., because I can't remember exactly how i made something work in the end!

I will be using this to make sure I understand my own output at a depth I can remember, and I will be using it to do the same for reviewing complex PRs or diving into new parts of the codebase.

I think you’re on the money with the problem of maintaining (another) source of truth.

Speaking from personal experience, I still find myself reaching for Whiteboard. It’s helpful when it’s critical for me as a developer to understand the implementation, which is certainly not every change!

In the future, we want to deliver a hosted product that addresses the N+1 concern you raised. The problem with the existing tools is that plans don’t stay up to date with what the agent decided to implement, and the back-and-forth that happens after the initial prompt isn’t captured. We believe a single whiteboard canvas can be used to capture not only a plan at design time, but what happens after.

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