Calling it a 'canvas' makes me think that this tool is about AI agents doing some kind of collaborative drawing. Looking at the vid though, it's more like an environment for visually organizing and managing agentic work (which seems very cool).
TheTaytay 7 minutes ago [-]
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.)
BloondAndDoom 40 minutes ago [-]
I didn’t read the post, I checked out the website just like 99% of the people will do.
Simple advice, if you are selling a product with a selling point of being visual, show it on your website. Not in a YouTube video but actual screenshots, short cut 10 sec video/gif
onion2k 9 minutes ago [-]
It's a shame the team don't have access to a product that would automatically research and implement what's needed on an AI product website.
a24venka 39 minutes ago [-]
Definite miss on our part, we're working on making the product experience more visible upfront on our landing page.
salomonk_mur 19 minutes ago [-]
Friend, in the age of AI and even more so if you are selling an AI product, all you need is literally 2 screenshots and one prompt.
metalliqaz 3 minutes ago [-]
There is an inverse relationship between how obviously useful a product is and how easy it is to produce screenshots.
airstrike 7 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
visekr 3 minutes ago [-]
whoa congrats on the launch. lol I launched my visual canvas for agents today too. I went in a more of a collaborative canvas IDE, agent orchestration direction. But very cool to see your take on it
I'm completely sold on the canvas layer. Embracing non linearity is such a boon when you're on the ideas stage. When you have verified it though, moving it to another medium (a document, presentation or just code) is often the best choice.
Do you see the canvases created with Spine as "one off" that you discard when you have got your deliverable, or as something living that you keep around?
I'm building a side project for running SQL on a canvas (kavla.dev), so I'm thinking about canvas workflows all the time!
a24venka 10 minutes ago [-]
Thanks! Great question. We see canvases as living workspaces, you can revisit, iterate on, and build on them over time.
But the deliverables (docs, slides, code) are first-class outputs you can export and use independently. So it works both ways depending on the workflow.
Kavla looks cool, canvas-based SQL is a great use case for this kind of thinking!
aleda145 3 minutes ago [-]
Nice! I'll make sure to try out Spine this weekend, if you want detailed feedback feel free to email me. You can find it in my profile.
woeirua 17 minutes ago [-]
Interesting idea, I wanted to see an example of the agents working on a canvas when I opened your page. I saw nothing of the sort. Sorry, but immediate fail.
This may be too harsh, but you need to make it immediately clear to someone today why they can't just have Claude Code one shot your app!
a24venka 13 minutes ago [-]
This is good feedback and definitely something we are improving.
gravity2060 21 minutes ago [-]
What does it mean to say 30,000 monthly credits and 1500 daily refresh credits? If my project takes 7000 credits (the way your demo does) then does that mean I couldn’t actually do it on the lowest available pricing plan because I couldn’t use 7000 credits in one run? If this is the case, what am abysmal pricing model!
a24venka 14 minutes ago [-]
The daily refresh isn't a cap on usage, it's additional credits you get each day (resets to 1,500 nightly regardless of use).
You can use your full 30k balance in a single run if needed. The daily refresh just tops you back up over time so you're not waiting for a monthly reset.
vivzkestrel 7 minutes ago [-]
excuse my memory at this point, arent there like a 100 of these posted on HN every month that all have something to do with multi agent collaboration that support 1000 models?
pqs 38 minutes ago [-]
I had to read this text in order to understand what this tool does, because I could not know from the website (without watching a video). You should use Spine to improve your website. ;-)
gravity2060 56 minutes ago [-]
In the demo video you shared (yt link) how many credits did that whole project take? What is the prices to fix elements of it (for example of you dislike a minor aspect of the generated spreadsheet do follow up instructions utilize only the narrow subset of agents that has been demoed to that subtask, or does it create new agents who have to create new context in the narrow follow up task?)
a24venka 48 minutes ago [-]
Credits are consumed by the blocks that get generated, not by the agents themselves. Some blocks are cheaper than others. A simple prompt or image block is a single model call, while browser use or deliverable blocks like documents and spreadsheets run models in a loop and cost more. Blocks also cost more when they have more blocks connected to them (more input tokens).
In the demo video I shared, the task cost about ~7,000 credits since it ran around 10 BrowserUse blocks and produced multiple deliverables.
If you want to fix a specific block (or set of blocks), you can select them and the chat will scope itself to primarily work on those. In that case fewer blocks run, so it's cheaper.
nusl 36 minutes ago [-]
7000 credits, ouch. The tool is really cool, I do think it's super useful. I also like the swarm particle animations in the backround.
sebmellen 2 hours ago [-]
Just as a tiny first piece of feedback, the main marketing website is very hard to understand or grok without a demo of how the tool works. Even just the quick YouTube video that you added in your post here, if embedded, would make a difference.
There are so many "agentic tools" out there that it's really hard to see what differentiates this just based on the website.
a24venka 1 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the feedback! Definitely agree that we could do more with the marketing site. We're working on a gallery page to showcase some demos.
jpbryan 1 hours ago [-]
Why do I need a canvas to visualize the work that the agents are doing? I don't want to see their thought process, I just want the end product like how ChatGPT or Claude currently work.
a24venka 1 hours ago [-]
That is definitely a valid way of using Spine as well. You can just work in the chat and consume the deliverables similar to how you would in other tools.
The canvas helps when you want to trace back why an output wasn't what you expected, or if you're curious to dig deeper.
Even beyond auditability, the canvas also helps agents do better work: they can generate in parallel, explore branches, and pass context to each other in a structured way (especially useful for longer-running tasks).
gravity2060 1 hours ago [-]
Is it possible to build self-improving swarm loops? (ie swarm x builds a thing, swarm y critiques and improved x’s work, repeat…)
a24venka 59 minutes ago [-]
We've only partially explored this so far, but it's a great suggestion.
The canvas architecture naturally supports this kind of loop since agents can already read and build on each other's outputs — so the plumbing is there, it's more about building the right orchestration on top. Definitely something we're exploring.
dude250711 1 hours ago [-]
Dark UI pattern: pretends that it is immediately usable only to redirect for sign-up.
a24venka 57 minutes ago [-]
Fair point, we should be more upfront about the sign-up step. Given that tasks are long-running and token-intensive, we do need an auth barrier to protect against abuse, but we can definitely do a better job signaling that before you hit the canvas.
garciasn 47 minutes ago [-]
Or, just show us in an animated GIF how the product works in practice. Then, should we somehow find benefit in a visual representation of a swarm's workflow, we could sign up rather than having to, unintuitively, scroll down to watch a YouTube video.
e: 'be' to 'we'; oops.
a24venka 40 minutes ago [-]
Good call and noted. We're working on making the product experience more visible upfront.
How am I supposed to get anything out of this? Consider that agents are going to get faster and run more and more tasks in parallel. This is not manageable for a human to follow in real time. I can barely keep up with one agent in real-time, let alone a swarm.
What I could see being useful is if you monitored the agents and notified me when one is in the middle of something that deserves my attention.
a24venka 43 minutes ago [-]
This is a fair point, we are exploring progressive disclosure on the canvas to better utilize the space and make the key artifacts more readily visible. We do have other panels (the chat, task and deliverable) that have alternate views of what the agent did and the key deliverables.
Beyond human auditability, the canvas helps the agents do a better job by generating in parallel, exploring branches and passing context to each other in a structured way.
stuckkeys 1 hours ago [-]
That is a bold claim for a wrapper lol
mlnj 53 minutes ago [-]
Elaborate?
bhekanik 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
techpulse_x 32 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
bhekanik 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 15:32:34 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.)
Simple advice, if you are selling a product with a selling point of being visual, show it on your website. Not in a YouTube video but actual screenshots, short cut 10 sec video/gif
https://getmesa.dev is mine
I'm completely sold on the canvas layer. Embracing non linearity is such a boon when you're on the ideas stage. When you have verified it though, moving it to another medium (a document, presentation or just code) is often the best choice.
Do you see the canvases created with Spine as "one off" that you discard when you have got your deliverable, or as something living that you keep around?
I'm building a side project for running SQL on a canvas (kavla.dev), so I'm thinking about canvas workflows all the time!
But the deliverables (docs, slides, code) are first-class outputs you can export and use independently. So it works both ways depending on the workflow.
Kavla looks cool, canvas-based SQL is a great use case for this kind of thinking!
This may be too harsh, but you need to make it immediately clear to someone today why they can't just have Claude Code one shot your app!
You can use your full 30k balance in a single run if needed. The daily refresh just tops you back up over time so you're not waiting for a monthly reset.
In the demo video I shared, the task cost about ~7,000 credits since it ran around 10 BrowserUse blocks and produced multiple deliverables.
If you want to fix a specific block (or set of blocks), you can select them and the chat will scope itself to primarily work on those. In that case fewer blocks run, so it's cheaper.
There are so many "agentic tools" out there that it's really hard to see what differentiates this just based on the website.
The canvas helps when you want to trace back why an output wasn't what you expected, or if you're curious to dig deeper.
Even beyond auditability, the canvas also helps agents do better work: they can generate in parallel, explore branches, and pass context to each other in a structured way (especially useful for longer-running tasks).
The canvas architecture naturally supports this kind of loop since agents can already read and build on each other's outputs — so the plumbing is there, it's more about building the right orchestration on top. Definitely something we're exploring.
e: 'be' to 'we'; oops.
How am I supposed to get anything out of this? Consider that agents are going to get faster and run more and more tasks in parallel. This is not manageable for a human to follow in real time. I can barely keep up with one agent in real-time, let alone a swarm.
What I could see being useful is if you monitored the agents and notified me when one is in the middle of something that deserves my attention.
Beyond human auditability, the canvas helps the agents do a better job by generating in parallel, exploring branches and passing context to each other in a structured way.