[verdict][curated prompt][source: skribbl.dev]
Can I vibecode Skribbl?
// buildable in a weekend, but real gaps stay open
The canvas is the easy half. React Flow plus xterm.js plus node-pty gets you panning, zooming and half a dozen live agent terminals in a weekend, and it is a genuinely nice way to watch a fleet work. The gaps are all in the boring layer underneath: knowing when an agent is actually blocked on you rather than just quiet, keeping sessions alive across a restart or a crash, and counting tokens accurately enough that the number can be trusted. Each of those is days of work on its own, and the weekend build reads as finished until the first agent silently dies behind a tab you were not looking at.
confidence: medium
what it is: Infinite canvas where coding agents run as live terminal nodes you wire together by drawing
Buildability index · an editorial game
- Price 8.25 $/month weight: plus 1
- Time a weekend for the canvas, multi-day for the parts that make it trustworthy weight: plus 2
- Category developer tools no weight
- Moat execution quality · integrations weight: minus 2
- Confidence medium weight: zero
- What you lose 4 items weight: minus 2
- Site skribbl.dev (si apre in una nuova scheda) no weight
They cancel out. This is where it comes down to how much the subscription annoys you.
Gioco editoriale: il verdetto dice se un agente può, l’indice se conviene.
What you build
Spawn real shells as draggable nodes on a pan/zoom canvas, run a coding agent in each one, and watch several of them work side by side.
what you need
- Node 20 and native build tools for node-pty
- A coding agent CLI already installed and authenticated
- tmux, if you want sessions to survive a restart
An honest kinda · the canvas is a weekend, the process supervision under it is not.
The prompt
A weekend with a coding agent. The gaps that stay are right below, under “what you lose”.
Build me a canvas for running several coding agents at once, like Skribbl. Requirements:
- Electron plus React, with React Flow for the pan/zoom canvas and xterm.js plus
node-pty for the terminals. No web version, this is a desktop app.
- Each node is a real shell in its own process, spawned with node-pty in a working
directory I pick per node. Double click empty canvas to add one, and let me type in
it exactly like a normal terminal.
- Node position, size, title and cwd persist to a JSON file in the Electron userData
folder, restored on launch. The shells themselves do not survive, say so in the UI
rather than pretending they do.
- Spawn each shell inside `tmux new-session -A -s <nodeId>` so a crashed window can
reattach to the running agent instead of killing it. Budget real time for this, the
reattach and scrollback restore is the fiddly part of the whole build.
- Drag from one node to another to draw a link, and store the links with a direction.
Right click a link to delete it. Links are just recorded relationships for now, no
message passing between agents.
- A top bar counting tokens per node, parsed from each agent CLI's own usage output.
Keep input, output, cache write and cache read as four separate counters, never sum
them into one number, a cache read costs about a tenth of an input token.
- Out of scope: multiplayer, cloud sync, code signing, and any status indicator you
would have to infer by scraping terminal output. Guessing wrong there is worse than
showing nothing.
- README with the node-pty rebuild step for your Electron version, which is the one
thing that will break on a fresh machine. Curated prompt: written and reviewed by hand for this app. In English on purpose — it is the language coding agents work best in.
What you lose
- hook-driven agent status, so a blocked agent looks the same as an idle one
- session survival across restarts and crashes
- an accurate token meter, cache reads price nothing like input tokens
- a signed and notarized Mac build, so Gatekeeper blocks what you ship to anyone else
Why people still pay
Not for the canvas. For the layer that keeps twelve child processes honest: status that comes from the agent itself instead of scraped output, sessions that come back after a reboot, and a spend number accurate enough to act on before the bill arrives.
moat: Execution quality Integrations what a moat is
process supervision, session durability, per-agent metering
Who has already built it
Starting from here is still vibecoding: the prompt is for when you want it exactly your way.
- claude-squad (opens in a new tab) — open-source terminal manager for multiple agents in tmux and git worktrees
- Crystal (opens in a new tab) — open-source desktop app running parallel agent sessions in worktrees
- vibe-kanban (opens in a new tab) — open-source board for queueing and reviewing coding agent tasks
Do you agree?
The vote balance
Ancora nessun voto: il tuo è il primo.
Nessun voto ancora — il primo pesa.