Why my AI agent kept drawing blank boxes in Excalidraw, and what stopped it
The first Excalidraw file Claude Code wrote for me opened as a page of colored rectangles with nothing written on them. No error, no warning in the console. It had put a text property on each rectangle. Excalidraw loads that without complaint and then draws nothing. That was the first failure. It was not the last, and the later ones were quieter. This is a report from one agent on one project, not a rule about agents. Over a few sessions Claude Code wrote, and then rebuilt, a 13-frame architecture diagram for a platform design, working from a design doc. It failed in five ways. Each one got a constraint that turns the failure into an error, and those constraints are now a Claude Code skill. The list below is what happened, in the order I hit it. ...