tldraw demos bringing agents to the canvas: visible fairy agents with an orchestrator
AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-09-09
tldraw product engineer Max Drake walks through the real engineering needed to make agents understand 2D space — coding agents thrive on text, but fall apart when asked to align objects on a canvas.
The progression:
- Getting a model to read a canvas from a screenshot plus the underlying JSON; asked to make a mouse blow out a candle, it produces wind and then smoke, correctly positioned.
- An MIT-licensed agent starter kit where agents set their own todos and move their viewport to explore.
- Fairies: agents rendered as visible characters you can throw around and recolor — with ten running, you read their state at a glance instead of scrolling chat logs.
- Select several and you get a group chat, one acting as orchestrator assigning work and reviewing results.
- A dependency graph where every node is a coding agent, plus a desktop build letting any agent script the editor.
The talk opens with a colleague's demo: the whiteboard app turned into a window manager playing Pong with real desktop windows.
Related event: tldraw Brings Coding Agents Onto the Infinite Canvas(2 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- Lightfield Raises Series A to Rebuild CRM as a 'Business World Model' for Agents — dair_ai · 2026-09-11
- 95% local AI + 5% GPT-6: a full basketball tracking pipeline breakdown — TheMoonMidas · 2026-09-11
- NutPrint turns your Claude Code water footprint into almonds, right in the status bar — james_mtc · 2026-09-11
- Sentry CEO: Building a game bot starts with a mini engine of the game itself — zeeg · 2026-09-11
- Astral's goal: installing CPython via uv should get you the fastest build — charliermarsh · 2026-09-11
- python-build-standalone measured fastest CPython: 10% faster than Homebrew, 18% than official Docker — charliermarsh · 2026-09-11