Today we're launching Prototyper 1.0. The first visual workspace for your agents and your team.
Humans are visual. We think in diagrams, shapes, and sketches, and we've been drawing to make sense of the world since long before we even had words. Data is easier to understand when you can see it. Plans are easier to follow as diagrams. Yet, almost everything agents produce today comes back as a wall of text.
Prototyper changes that. It's the first workspace built to give your agents real visual capabilities, a shared canvas where humans and agents work on the same things.
Every tool has an opinion
I believe that every tool has an opinion. It makes some things effortless and others slow or annoying. And that's not a flaw, it's the core of design. Someone has gone through the effort to make a thousand decisions, so you don't have to. It's why most of us buy cars and iPhones and sandwiches instead of building them from scratch. Civilization runs on these reused decisions.
Which is why I'm wary of the idea that the future is generic blocks you assemble yourself. It sounds liberating, but it isn't how great design works. The deeper you go into any domain, the more specific your tools get, not more generic. A Michelin chef doesn't reach for a knife, they reach for their knife.
Not that there is an opinionless layer to retreat to anyway. Machine code has its rules, frameworks have opinions, all the way down to the core. The real question is not whether to hold opinions, but which ones to embed, and where they live.
So when we say "everything is a file," we mean it as a substrate, not a product. The file is the neutral floor, the humblest, most navigable layer we could hand an agent to stand on. The product lives above it. That's the line we drew, and these are the principles that we distilled from it:
Core principles
- Everything is a file. In Prototyper, everything from plans, to apps, and diagrams, can be read as a file. A filesystem is the most natural way for an agent to navigate: it discovers new content and functionality just by traversing the tree. We kept this layer deliberately thin and unopinionated, because it's the substrate, not the experience. It's the foundation that makes everything work on top.
- Built for the agents you already use. People run all kinds of models and harnesses, often several at once. Prototyper doesn't lock you into one, it's built to work with any agent that you like. That means that any agent can read from and write to your workspace.
- It's fast. File writes land in under a millisecond. That's not a bogus metric, it's what makes the whole thing feel seamless and like a real extension of your thinking. Everything should feel instant.
- Visual first. Every file in your workspace can be opened on the canvas. Whether you're an engineer working on a new frontend or a PM building a product roadmap. It's a real visual workspace for the actual work, not a description of it. And it's not a blank canvas with a box of primitives: the canvas represents a real unix system, which is the kind of purpose-built, opinionated experience that makes a product. The substrate is generic so the things you build on it don't have to be.
- Built for the web. Prototyper runs real React applications, so your workspaces can do real things. From advanced data visualizations to pixel-perfect product design.
Use cases
Prototyper shines in a handful of places. Here are three I reach for myself, every single day.
1. A visual workspace for AI
When I'm designing a new product feature or experimenting with an interaction pattern, Prototyper is where I go to see the idea as a real, working application instead of a description of one. And because it's native to the agents I already use — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor — the handoffs disappear: I can sketch something in Prototyper, refine it with Claude Code, and have Codex wire it into the rest of the system, all without leaving the workspace.
2. Project management
I have my agents draft plans directly in Prototyper — and not flat markdown to-do lists. I mean real, structured projects: working through the design of a new tokenizer, mapping out a system, anything that benefits from an environment richer than a checklist. It's quietly become one of the most useful things I do with the product.
3. An orchestration layer for agents
I let Claude Code, Codex, and the rest write their messages and plans into Prototyper, and use it as the coordination layer between them. Because everything is a file, the things agents lean on — memories as markdown, skills, shared context — all get a natural home that every agent can read from and write to.
What we're building toward
Prototyper is a new category of product, and we're just getting started.
We're not trying to reduce work to a bland table of primitives for you to assemble. We'd rather build toward a world of passion projects, unique contributions, tools shaped by the people who use them, each carrying a specific purpose. The file is just the floor that makes that possible.
Prototyper is the first step toward making collaboration between humans and agents feel like working with a teammate, not operating a tool.
