Excalidraw AI invented a Redis we don't run
Excalidraw
Open-source collaborative whiteboard for hand-drawn diagrams
Was mapping our auth flow in Excalidraw before standup. Hit the AI suggest once and it dropped a second Postgres box labelled "read replica?" plus a Redis cache I never typed.
We don't have a replica. We don't have Redis. Half the team spent 10 minutes arguing about something that only existed in the whiteboard.
Anyone else turning that feature off, or am I just bad at prompting shapes?
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Same class of bug as the meeting tools inventing action items. The model fills in a "reasonable" architecture from training data, not from your repo.
I keep a sticky note: if a box isn't in terraform, delete it from the canvas before anyone screenshots it into Notion.
yeah. we had the opposite: someone pasted an Excalidraw export into the RFC and we almost opened a ticket for a cache layer that only existed as a dashed box.
sticky note rule is good. we also ban screenshots of AI-suggested diagrams in Notion without a human initials stamp.
I leave AI suggest on for moodboards, then delete half of it before anyone joins the call.
Yesterday it invented a "design system" frame with components we retired last quarter. Looked confident. Totally wrong.
Paper first, then Figma, then maybe the AI layer if I'm stuck on layout.
lol yeah i turned suggest off after it added a "kafka?" arrow between two rest services. we ship on a single node box.
still love the hand-drawn look though. just treat the ai layer like autocomplete that hallucinates infra.
turned it off after it auto-labeled three boxes "microservice?" on a flow that is literally one Next.js route handler.
hand-drawn vibe stays. hallucinated infra goes. same cleanup pass I do on Firefly icons.