Explorable Graph Canvas
Relationships you can read; graph as an explorable canvas with agents.
Lesson
Ideas that can bring value no longer need to be shelved; accelerated at the pace of coding agents.
The lesson in full: Agents can spam endless ideas but not all are value-bringing; humans understand the problem context and can curate the valuable ones but lack time. The combination gives fast iteration, sure, but it also demands much higher/clear specification and discipline in defining the problem and the desired outcomes.
What it is
A canvas in Surface where the relationships around an asset are laid out as a graph, with an agent proposing related assets and the person deciding what stays. The second iteration was a remake for legibility: edge bundling, zoom-dependent level of detail and clustering, so a large neighborhood reads at a glance instead of as a hairball. Connecting different data sources and making them accessible to end users has always been at the core of the product, and this iteration reinforced that principle, in the newly reimagined Surface. These ideas are not new, but have been shelved for so long. The reason it’s possible now is because the coding agents can iterate with a clear spec and driving use case. This also explores the concept of ‘chatting on a graph’ where each node expansion is driven via agents instead of predetermining (based on ontology or static rules). So rather than working with a linear flow, each ‘chat’ now creates a forked graph where one can navigate different branches and explore multiple possibilities simultaneously.
Tools and technologies
Graph Visualization · Design System · Edge Bundling · Clustering
Lineage
Built on lessons from UX Reboot and Design System, Multi-Agent Reasoning Engine, Real-Time 2D/3D Collaboration.