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TheTaytaytoday at 3:25 PM1 replyview on HN

I think this is really neat. You should probably take it as a compliment that the biggest criticisms so far are about the website landing page. ;)

I like canvases in general, and I especially like them for mentally organizing and referring to this sort of broad work. (Honestly, I think zoomable canvases would make a better window manager in general, but I digress)

One small piece of friction: My default mouse-based ways of dragging the canvas around (that work in most canvases like Figma) aren't working. I saw that you had a tutorial, and I have learned to hold space now, but I prefer the "hold middle mouse button to drag my canvas view around".

I've got a couple of research tasks running now, and my current open questions as a very new user are: 1) How easy will it be to store the outputs into a Github repository. 2) How easy will it be to refer back to this later? 3) Can I build upon it manually or automatically? 4) Can I (securely) share it with someone else for them to see and build upon it? 5) Can I do something "locally" with it? Not necessarily the model, but my preferred interface for LLMs at this point is Claude Code. Could I have a Claude Code instance running in one of these boxes somehow? 6) What if I want to do private stuff with it and don't like the traffic going through Spine's servers? Could I pay them for the interface, but bring my own keys? (Related: Can I self host somehow?) 7) When this is done, each artifact it found (screenshot, webpage, etc), is going to be helpful. The data-hoarder in me wants to make sure I can search these later. Heck, if I could do that, this would become my preferred "web browser". (But again, I digress.)


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a24venkatoday at 3:37 PM

Really appreciate the detailed feedback and questions! And yes, we'll take the website criticism as a compliment :)

Good callout on the canvas navigation, we'll look into middle mouse button support.

To answer your questions: 1) GitHub integration is on our roadmap. Right now you can export outputs manually but we want to make this seamless. 2) All your canvases are saved and you can search them by name in your dashboard. We're also working on a dedicated section for deliverables across canvases. 3) Yes to both! You can manually add or edit blocks, or kick off new agent runs that build on existing work. 4) You can currently only share public links of your canvas to others (but you can make it private at any point). We are testing out a teams feature which allows you to share canvases with members on your team securely. Beyond that, we are working on adding roles and email-based sharing controls which is in our roadmap. 5) Claude Code in a block is a really interesting idea. We don't support that today but we're thinking about computer use and coding workflows. 6)BYOK (bring your own keys) is something we've heard interest in and are considering. Self-hosting isn't available right now, though we do support private deployments for enterprise customers if that's ever relevant. 7) Love the 'preferred web browser' framing. Right now you can search canvases but searchable artifacts across canvases is definitely where we want to head.

Thanks for giving it a real spin, this kind of feedback is incredibly valuable.

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