Should I vibe code
Online collaborative whiteboard for diagrams, workshops, and planning
A canvas is easy. A canvas forty people drag things around on simultaneously is a research project.
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Their verdict, the Starter price and the build-time estimate come from their entry, MIT-licensed. Checked 2026-08-03.
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Our verdict, the regret score and everything below it. Editorial and unsponsored — nobody can pay to be moved.
The honest answer
why the verdict is what it is
Solo whiteboarding is very buildable. Real-time multiplayer with conflict resolution is the entire product and it is genuinely hard.
What actually breaks
not "if". the specific failures.
- Real-time multiplayer on a canvas, which is the product — without it this is a drawing app nobody opens twice
- Performance past a few thousand objects, where naive rendering turns a workshop into a slideshow
- Concurrent manipulation of the same object, since two people dragging one sticky note need a resolution rule
- Cursor presence and awareness, which is what makes a shared canvas feel inhabited rather than eerie
- Infinite canvas coordinates, where zoom, pan and hit-testing all need care that a fixed-size canvas never demanded
The workshop is twelve people and it works for the first twenty minutes. Then the board passes a few thousand objects, because that is what a workshop produces, and every pan re-renders everything. Frame rate falls to single digits, cursors lag several seconds behind, and two people dragging the same cluster produce a tug of war neither wins. Nobody says the tool is broken. They open a shared document instead and finish the session there, which is the same outcome as broken.
Is that you?
the verdict is a default, not a law
- It is single-user — a personal canvas for thinking, with no collaboration at all
- It is a viewer for boards created elsewhere
- The object count is bounded and small by design
- A workshop depends on it working with everyone connected
- Rendering redraws everything on pan or zoom
- There is no rule for two people manipulating the same object
- You have not tested at a few thousand objects
If you build it anyway
the checklist, then the prompt that enforces it
- Test at ten thousand objects before building features. Performance is not a polish item here; it decides whether the tool survives a real session.
- Render with viewport culling and spatial indexing, and batch draws. Never redraw the whole scene on every frame.
- Use an established CRDT for the document, and treat cursor presence as ephemeral state that never enters the persistent document.
- Define what happens when two people move the same object — last-writer-wins per property is usually acceptable and must be chosen deliberately.
- Persist to the server continuously, so a dropped connection during a workshop loses nothing.
- If collaboration is out of scope, say so plainly rather than building a single-user tool that looks collaborative.
Before you build a collaborative whiteboard, apply these and push back if I ask you to break them. 1. Tell me that real-time multiplayer is the product. A single-user infinite canvas is a pleasant weekend; the collaboration is what makes it a whiteboard, and it is most of the work. 2. Before building features, generate ten thousand objects and measure pan, zoom and drag frame rates. Report the numbers. A workshop produces thousands of objects within an hour. 3. Render with a spatial index and viewport culling, batching draw calls. Never redraw the entire scene per frame. 4. Use an established CRDT library for the document state. Do not write merge logic for a shared canvas. 5. Keep cursor positions and selections as ephemeral presence data, broadcast separately and never written into the persistent document. 6. Define and implement the rule for two users manipulating the same object. Last-writer-wins per property is usually fine, but it must be a decision rather than an accident. 7. Persist continuously to the server so that a lost connection mid-workshop costs nothing. 8. Handle infinite canvas coordinates explicitly — precision at extreme zoom, hit-testing under transforms, and a way to return to content when lost. 9. Out of scope unless I ask: templates, voting, timers, embeds, comments, video chat.
That one keeps you out of trouble. For the prompt that actually builds it, canivibecodeit.com has one.
their build prompt ↗Or don’t build it
the boring option, and the way back out
If more than one person will use it live, buy it. $10 a month is cheap against multiplayer rendering performance and conflict handling, and the failure here is social — a laggy board in a workshop ends the workshop rather than producing a bug report.
$10/mo is cheaper than your weekend.
Export boards to SVG or a documented JSON shape, since a workshop's output is frequently referenced for months afterwards and should not depend on your renderer. Keep images and attachments in plain storage alongside.
Open-source canvas/whiteboard SDK and app; excellent prior art for DIY whiteboards.
Questions
Why keep cursors out of the document state?
Because they change constantly and never need to be durable. Routing cursor updates through the same synchronised, persisted document that holds the content means writing dozens of updates per second per user into a structure designed for permanence — which is both a performance problem and a history full of noise. Presence belongs on a separate ephemeral channel.
How does object count grow so fast?
A single workshop exercise with a dozen people produces hundreds of sticky notes in minutes, and boards are rarely cleaned up afterwards. A board that has hosted a few sessions is routinely in the thousands, which is well past the point where naive full-scene rendering stays smooth — and smooth is the entire requirement during a live session.
Every week, someone ships something they shouldn’t have.
New verdicts, the worst thing that landed in the trap, and the occasional incident report. No other email, ever.
last reviewed 2026-08-03 · verdict is editorial and unsponsored · shared entry data from canivibecodeit under MIT · not legal advice