side quests
the pursuits around the company — ruiz's pre-tldraw libraries, the demos and experiments, and the community projects the canvas attracted.
ruiz's experiments
- 2019–2021state-designer · endedstate-designer — ruiz's statecharts state-management library with its own visual ide. the arrow-routing work inside it spawned perfect-arrows; the ide instinct — a tool that shows you the system — is the direct ancestor of tldraw.
- 2020–perfect-arrows · continuingperfect-arrows — the hand-drawn-look arrow-routing library, launched via july 2020 tweet threads and now ~2.8k stars. it ships inside tldraw itself: the library that outlived the app it was built for.
- 2020–perfect-freehand · continuingperfect-freehand — pressure-sensitive freehand ink as a library. adopted by excalidraw ('christopher had me implement in excalidraw'), reportedly also next.js live, milanote, and clover — the first proof that ruiz's canvas taste could be sold as a component rather than an app.
- 2021-03globs.design · endedglobs.design — the globs-based vector editor ruiz built in march 2021. 'tldraw mostly grew out of another project of mine (globs.design).' archived once tldraw existed.
the company's quests
- 2021–2023the vs code extension · endedthe vs code extension — a tldraw editor inside the editor, already shipping at the november 2021 launch. it rode the v1 codebase and was left behind by the v2 rewrite.
- 2022–2023the v2 rewrite · handed-offthe v2 rewrite — the 'new tldraw' beta announced with the seed round, replacing the app at tldraw.com in april 2023. v1 was parked at old.tldraw.com 'until the end of time' and later moved to tldraw/tldraw-v1 under mit — the permanence promise that anchors the license argument.
- 2023–signia · continuingsignia — the rewrite's reactive state library, released standalone under mit in march 2023 and co-authored by ruiz and sheldrick. the one piece of the engine given away outright.
- 2023–make real · continuingmake real — the flagship demo lineage. forked from sawyer hood's draw-a-ui the morning after it hit, shipped in a night, packaged as make-real-starter days later. still the reference story for 'the canvas is dom'; by 2026 ruiz was calling it 'quaint' on stage.
- 2023–2024draw fast · endeddraw fast — the real-time sketch-to-image demo on fal.ai, ~120ms a frame. #2 product of the day on product hunt, an andy baio link post, then taken down january 14, 2024. the demo-sunset pattern established early.
- 2024carry on · endedcarry on — canvas autocomplete. lu wilson's version ran on claude haiku; taha hassan built a variant on a local llama3 8b. the first internal answer to 'what does an ai do on an infinite canvas.'
- 2024teach · endedteach — the summer-2024 project where an agent learns to manipulate the canvas, built by ruiz, wilson, and engineer-in-residence orion reed. the research thread between make real's generation tricks and tldraw computer's workflows.
- 2024-08–tldraw sync · activetldraw sync — the self-hosted sync add-on, the sdk's first paid-adjacent module, included with the license. a cloudflare template and a demo server that wipes data after 24 hours.
- 2024-12–2025tldraw computer · endedtldraw computer — natural-language node-and-wire workflows on the canvas, built with google / google deepmind for the gemini 2.0 window. waitlist december 13, open december 18; the company's biggest hn thread ever (553 points). deliberately closed source — issue #5122 points users to the starter kits instead.
- 2025-09–the starter kits · activethe starter kits — five mit-licensed sdk starting points shipped with sdk 4.0: agent, workflow, branching chat, chat, multiplayer. the answer to 'give us the demo source' is 'here are mit-licensed starting points.'
- 2025-12fairies · endedfairies — visible multi-agent collaborators on tldraw.com, sold as a deliberately time-boxed experiment: $25 one-time, december 2025 only, code public in the repo. the follow-up writeup describes the 'fairy management system' and agents working essentially blind.
- 2026-07–tldraw offline · activetldraw offline — the free, file-based desktop app (.tldraw files, no accounts, no server, scripting and agent access) for macos, windows, and linux. 16k+ downloads in the first week, self-reported; multiplayer followed august 13.
- 2026-09tldraw flash · endedtldraw flash — hand-drawn lo-fi animation: record-drag motion, a timeline, export. built largely by interns audrey leo and leo knudsen with max drake and daniel lefcourt.
- 2023–the sdk roster · continuingthe sdk roster — the commercial proof: clickup whiteboards (with a case study), padlet sandbox, jam, mobbin, autodesk, craft, google, replit, blackrock, shopify, luma, runway, honeycomb, schoolai, brisk, google stitch, dirac. the company claims ~$1m of license revenue in year one.
the ecosystem
- 2022-03the macpaint skin · endedthe macpaint skin — a community-built macpaint-themed tldraw interface hit 59 points on hn in march 2022, months before the company existed as such. early evidence that people would build on the canvas unprompted.
- 2023-11draw-a-ui · handed-offdraw-a-ui — figma engineer sawyer hood's original: a tldraw component plus gpt-4v turning sketches into working html. ~13.5k github stars; tldraw forked it the next morning and the fork became make real. hood works at figma — the irony is in the lane report.
- 2024–orion reed's canvas experiments · endedorion reed's canvas hci work — tldraw-3d, tldraw-graph-layout, and the propagators experiments, made during and around his engineer-in-residence stint. the research fringe that fed teach and the agent work.
- 2026-07community agent demos · continuingthe agent-drawing show hn — a community demo of an agent drawing on tldraw hit 53 points in july 2026. the sdk's second-order ecosystem: other people's agents on the canvas.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.