---
title: "The Spatial Harness: Bringing Agents to the Canvas"
category: "talks"
date: "2026-06-30"
time: "11:10am-11:30am"
track: "Design Engineering"
room: "Track 6"
speakers: ["Max Drake"]
sourceLabels: ["Official conference schedule", "Public YouTube metadata"]
scheduleTrack: "Design Engineering"
scheduleRoom: "Track 6"
scheduleLabels: ["Design Engineering", "Track 6", "session", "confirmed"]
---
# The Spatial Harness: Bringing Agents to the Canvas

## Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-06-30 · 11:10am-11:30am
- Track/room: Design Engineering · Track 6
- Speaker(s): Max Drake
- Session type/status: session · confirmed

- Track: Design Engineering
- Room: Track 6
- Session type: session
- Status: confirmed

## Session Description
What if chat is the wrong interface for managing agents? What if we're holding ourselves back by squeezing our thoughts and the way we work to into a one-dimensional, single-threaded interface? At a high level, this talk aims to present the work we've done at tldraw to build a spatial harness, or a way to allow agents to work on a canvas and collaborate with users and each other natively. This work represents important steps towards building better agent + canvas experiences, a product category we've seen explode in the recent months (Paper, Replit Agent 4, Google Stitch, etc). It's also not something I've really seen talked about elsewhere. See: - Multi-agent collaboration on the canvas (fairies.tldraw.com) - We've also recently brought code mode (https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/) to the tldraw desktop app and MCP app.

## Media Evidence
No related AI Engineer channel video found yet.

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

### Media Signals
No linked video, transcript, or slide source has been attached yet.

### Agent Reading Notes
Use these signals to refine the synopsis, topic links, people/company context, and method notes. If a source is a related external video rather than an exact official recording, keep it framed as supporting evidence.

## Transcript Status
No official session recording transcript was found by exact title match on the AI Engineer YouTube channel during this run.

## People
- [[max-drake]]

## Notes
- Pending transcript synthesis when an official recording or confirmed matching video is available.

## Synthesis
### Synthesized Breakdown
# The Spatial Harness: Bringing Agents to the Canvas ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-06-30 · 11:10am-11:30am - Track/room: Design Engineering · Track 6 - Speaker(s): Max Drake - Session type/status: session · confirmed - Track: Design Engineering - Room: Track 6 - Session type: session - Status: confirmed ## Session Description What if chat is the wrong interface for managing agents? What if we're holding ourselves back by squeezing our thoughts and the way we work to into a one-dimensional, single-threaded interface? At a high level, this talk aims to present the work we've done at tldraw to build a spatial harness, or a way to allow agents to work on a canvas and collaborate with users and each other natively. This work represents important steps towards building better agent + canvas experiences, a product category we've seen explode in the recent months (Paper, Replit Agent 4, Google Stitch, etc).

### Speaker And Company Context
- [[max-drake|Max Drake]] — Product Engineer at [[tldraw|tldraw]].

### Topics Covered
- [[coding-agents]]
- [[mcp]]

### Derived Links And Source Material

### Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
- No highlighted novel concept has been detected yet.

### Evidence Boundary
This synthesis is based on the official schedule and linked source pages. It should be revisited when exact session recordings or transcript-backed secondary sources are available.