Connect an AI Tool (MCP)

You need an account

Connecting an AI tool is a signed-in-only feature, the same as API tokens and teams. The canvas, sharing, and real-time collaboration stay account-free for guests, but driving your canvases programmatically is an advanced, opt-in capability that needs an account.

What the AI can do

The connection gives your AI tool these tools:

• Find canvases: search your canvases by name, across your personal library and the shared libraries of every team you belong to.
• Read a canvas: get a tab's contents as a text outline, and a picture of it when the AI asks for one.
• List templates: browse the same hand-tuned template library the editor's template starts offer.
• Create a canvas: turn a request into a new canvas, with one tab or several. A tab can start from a template: ask for "a retrospective" and the AI can lay down the curated scaffold, then fill in your content.
• Add a tab: add another tab (its own canvas) to an existing canvas, for example a detail view of one part. Tabs can start from a template too.
• Update a canvas: rework a whole tab or make a small adjustment.
• Share a canvas: turn a canvas into a share link to hand to someone. Unless you ask for another level, the AI makes a Participant link: people can add stickies, write and vote, but not reshape the board.
• Rename a canvas and Delete a canvas: tidy your library from the AI tool, a whole canvas or a single tab. Deleting a canvas moves it to the Trash; deleting a tab removes it for good.
• List the Trash and Restore a canvas: bring back something deleted by mistake, by you or by the AI.
• Search icons and List images: find an icon by what it shows, and find a picture you uploaded to your image gallery, so the AI can put them on the canvas.

For building the picture, the AI can just describe the graph (the nodes and what connects to what) and livediagram lays it out, so the tool doesn't have to work out coordinates. It only needs to say what exists and what links to what, or hand over the same thing as Mermaid text (a flowchart, state diagram, or ER diagram). It can group related boxes into labelled sections and choose a flow, a tree (an org chart), or a mind map. Box labels are kept to short headings: when the AI writes a long sentence, the box shows the heading and the full text goes into the box's note, so a chatty AI doesn't fill your diagram with paragraphs.

Beyond plain boxes and arrows, the AI can fill in sticky notes (in the sticky colours), tables, code blocks, entities (a titled record with field rows, for data models), swimlanes, bar, line, and pie charts, and Sankey diagrams (from a list of flows: what moves from where to where, and how much). Your AI tool may also surface a few ready-made prompts ("Diagram this", "Flowchart from steps" and "Show my canvas") as quick actions, so you don't have to know the tool names.

When the AI changes a canvas you have open, you see it happen: the change arrives on your canvas straight away, outlined for a moment in your colour, and a note at the bottom says what changed. Show takes you to it and Undo puts it back (your own Undo shortcut only ever undoes your own edits). Anything you change at the same time is kept. To review or undo a change after its note has gone, see Reviewing and Undoing an Agent's Changes. An element someone else in the canvas has selected is off limits: a change that touches it is refused, and the AI is told to leave it out or try again later.

The AI does the thinking; livediagram validates, lays out, saves, and renders what it produces. The MCP server runs no AI model of its own. New canvases an AI creates land at the root of My Work (or your default folder, if you set one), each with a Made by AI badge; the Made by AI filter lists them all, wherever you file them.