Zibel

A vector drawing tool that runs in the browser, built so AI agents can read and write the document through MCP while a person edits the same file in a normal Illustrator-style canvas.

Zibel is a short form of Zobel / zibeline, the sable marten whose hair makes the finest illustration brushes.

Status

Milestone M0 is in progress (issue #1). A local Worker already takes MCP calls to create a Document, draw rectangles into it, read its outline and render it to PNG. There is no browser UI yet.

Start here. Domain vocabulary is in CONTEXT.md and architecture decisions in docs/adr/.

Related MCP server: illustrator-mcp

Local development

Needs Node 22 or later.

corepack enable
pnpm install
pnpm check   # typecheck, Biome, and Vitest inside workerd
pnpm dev     # wrangler dev, MCP at http://localhost:8787/mcp

Every MCP request needs Authorization: Bearer <dev token>. The dev tokens and the Agent Actor each one maps to are in DEV_TOKENS in apps/edge/wrangler.jsonc. Documents are stored under .wrangler/state and survive a restart of pnpm dev.

To connect Claude Code, copy examples/claude-code.mcp.json to .mcp.json, or run:

claude mcp add --transport http zibel http://localhost:8787/mcp -H "Authorization: Bearer dev-token-a"

What it is meant to do

Three kinds of work, all producing editable vector output rather than images:

• Charts and diagrams, from data or from a Mermaid description

• Illustration, icons and logos, with Bezier paths, boolean operations, gradients and an appearance stack

• Freehand drawing with pressure, fitted to editable curves

Agents drive it over MCP. Every edit a person can make in the UI has a matching tool call, and every write returns both the affected node IDs and an optional rendered preview, so an agent can check its own work.

Planned shape

• Document model is a flat, ID-keyed scene graph serialised as readable JSON

• Rendering starts on Canvas2D and moves to Skia via CanvasKit as object counts grow

• Boolean operations use Skia PathOps; text is shaped with HarfBuzz

• Hosted on Cloudflare, with one Durable Object per document holding authoritative state; the same Worker bundle runs locally under wrangler dev and self-hosted under workerd

• MCP is stateless Streamable HTTP only: no stdio, no MCP sessions, every request carries its own token and document address

• Monorepo under apps/ and packages/, laid out in REQUIREMENTS.md section 8.3

Licence

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.

The Zibel name and logo are not covered by that licence.