Whiteboard Launches Open-Source VS Code Fork for Human-AI Collaborative Software Design

Whiteboard is an open-source desktop application built as a fork of VS Code, designed to facilitate collaborative software architecture between human developers and AI coding agents. The tool acts as a visual workspace where agents can draw diagrams and explain their work directly alongside the code they modify. It integrates with existing coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex, providing them with an SDK to draw on an in-app canvas. Key features include interactive diagrams (flow, sequence, entity relationship) that link to underlying code, a Rust-based semantic diff viewer that summarizes large changes and collapses noise, and interactive traces that link requirements to implementation. The application runs locally on the user's machine and is licensed under MIT. The developers recommend using models like Claude Opus or GPT-4o for the best balance of intelligence, cost, and speed.