The question I keep coming back to is what thinking even looks like now. Everything’s moving so fast that we skip straight to the end. You can get to an answer in seconds, and most days that’s brilliant. But the good stuff, for me anyway, comes from the mess before the answer: going wide, getting it wrong, smashing two daft ideas together and spotting a third. I wanted somewhere to play with that, properly, and see if my own thinking about thinking moved along with it.
Built on tldraw
v0.1 landed on 26 October and got the basics in: shared boards, notes, Markdown docs and AI answers streaming onto the canvas. It had a placeholder name and no real point of view yet. Building on tldraw meant the whiteboard part was sorted from day one, so every hour after that could go on the opinionated stuff.
Once the noodling idea clicked, it became Noodla, with twisted cable noodles that link ideas together and follow them round the board.
“Add them all and deploy”
On 7 November I brainstormed a load of creative thinking moves, and that was the whole instruction to the agents. Three waves went live the same day.
Tab branches a thought. Ghost branches offer Why?, Example, Opposite and What next?, and the opposite gets linked with a red tension noodle. P deals a provocation card when you’re stuck. There’s a five-minute burst with a countdown ring, lenses that tint the whole board (sceptic, customer, beginner, 10×), magnets that hold clusters together, and a silent round that hides everyone’s notes until somebody hits reveal, so nobody anchors on the loudest person in the room. Then a time-lapse replays the board in the order it was made.
Then Nood
My personal favourite. The brief was “go straight to 3D with little shadows, build and deploy”, and that’s exactly what it is: a little purple mascot sat on a bench in the corner. Wake it up and run it round. It drops notes, picks them up and carries them about, votes and stamps things Decided (it cheers when you do). Leave it alone and it wanders off, sits on notes nobody’s touched for a few minutes, then walks back to its bench and falls asleep. During a silent round it tiptoes.
Everyone on the board gets their own, with a name tag. Walk up to someone and you can follow them, wave or pass the pen.
Boards that land
Here’s where I get opinionated. The question you’re answering stays pinned at the top. Notes get stamped Decided, Parked or Killed. Funnel a pile of ideas down to three and the rest get parked. Wrap up turns all those marks into a Doc of decisions, next actions and assumptions to test. In Direction you say what came out of it, pick the Doc as the result and set the board aside. Nothing’s deleted, you can always bring it back.
I don’t think most boards should live forever. Get in, noodle, get out with a conclusion. Agents can do the getting out too: a board owner can give an AI assistant a key to that one board, read only or read and edit.
Where it’s heading
The ideas list is getting silly in the best way. The plan is multiverse boards you fork at a decision and merge back together, idea breeding (crossbreed two notes, mutate one, let the votes pick the survivors) and a graveyard that resurrects a killed idea when the reason you killed it stops being true. None of that’s built yet.
Will keep you posted.
The screenshots are from a sample board on a local build.
