MS
Mira Santos
19 hours ago
Claude nested Excalidraw groups until the .excalidraw hit 3.8MB
Excalidraw
Open-source collaborative whiteboard for hand-drawn diagrams
Asked Cursor to sketch our auth flow in Excalidraw before the design review.
It made a group for every rectangle. Then a group for every group. File opened fine in the browser, Figma import choked, and my MBP fan spun for a solid minute just selecting the login box.
Ended up redrawing three boxes by hand. Anyone found a prompt that keeps the nesting under control, or do I just ban agents from .excalidraw?
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same energy as when Continue invents nested folders for a one-file script. i export to svg now and paste into Notion. ugly but at least it opens.
svg escape hatch is real. we checked the .excalidraw into the repo once and the PR diff was 12k lines of coordinates. CI blamed me for 20 minutes.
max group depth prompts help for like one session then it forgets. i started asking for a flat frame list + arrows only — no groups at all. designers on my team still hate the layout but at least Figma import doesn't die.
tried the depth-2 thing on a live demo last week. worked until someone asked it to "tidy the diagram" — boom, ~900 nested groups. now i open excalidraw myself before the webinar and only let the agent fill sticky text.
we had one that duplicated the sticky notes ~40 times because the agent kept "aligning". locked the file and handed it a png instead. still want the editable version though — did you try telling it max group depth 2?