nexdraw | Devpost

cool collaborative drawing i made with nexdraw
tech stack

The Mission

I wanted to challenge the narrative that AI will take over artists' jobs. We like AI when it's an enhancement tool, but don't necessarily want it to take our jobs. Much like how Cursor hasn't quite replaced programmers, but has become a staple in the software development community by improving engineers' workflows significantly. I built Nexdraw as that challenge; the "Artist's Cursor," if you will.

What it does

You draw it. Nexdraw refines it. With Nano Banana Pro and the ability to reason across several image layers, Nexdraw autocompletes your masterpieces.

example

Nexdraw comes with both a familiar chat interface and an autocomplete system. You can either be a meticulous prompter, or a hands-free artist.

How we built it

Nexdraw is powered by Next.js 16 and a customized tldraw engine. At its core, I engineered a bespoke Layer Management System that uses tldraw’s side-effect engine to intercept and "tag" every shape into a centralized metadata registry. This allows the system to bind AI contributions to specific layers, giving artists the ability to toggle, reorder, or trash AI work with granular control, ensuring the "Cursor" never disturbs the artist's manual sketches.

The project’s intelligence comes from Google Gemini, which handles multimodal vision tasks by analyzing high-fidelity snapshots of the canvas. I built a custom pipeline that re-projects AI-generated assets back into the canvas coordinate space to ensure perfect spatial alignment with the user's work. Supabase provides the real-time backbone, utilizing PostgreSQL and live subscriptions to synchronize every stroke and AI suggestion instantly across sessions.

I also used TRAE as my primary IDE, which significantly sped up iteration, essentially being my "Cursor for code" while I built "Cursor for Artists."

trae

Challenges we ran into

Unfortunately, while Nano Banana 3 is a highly performant model, inference is rather slow, taking about ~10 seconds per generation. Downgrading to previous versions degrades the quality significantly, so I kept the existing flow.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Solo hacker!!1

What we learned

A lot

What's next for nexdraw

Obviously, this can be much improved. The art canvas is rather simplistic, and modern drawing tools feature several dozen more tools. This presents the opportunity for an AI art agent, rather than a state machine, to solve the task of human learning in the art industry.

cool drawing