AI Assistance

An optional assistant that answers questions about and tidies the diagram on the active tab.

AI Assistance is an optional panel that works alongside you on the canvas. It can answer questions about what is on the tab and tidy up an existing diagram. It is built around two modes, both driven from a single panel.

ASSISTANTBuildAskReviewCleanPROMPTSend
The Assistant panel: one prompt box, with Ask and Clean modes across the top.

An optional feature

AI Assistance is off by default and only appears when the people running livediagram have chosen to enable it. Because livediagram is free and open source, anyone can self-host it, and AI is deliberately not required to do so. When no AI provider is configured, the feature is hidden entirely: there is no toggle in Settings, no panel on the canvas, and no degraded experience to work around. Everything else in the editor behaves exactly the same.

When AI is available, you opt in from Settings. Once enabled, the assistant is surfaced from the Assistant section of the editor side panel, and on mobile through the bottom dock. The panel is hidden in view-only sessions, because the AI modes that change the diagram need edit access to persist their work.

What it can do

The assistant always works against the active tab only. Other tabs are never sent to it, so each tab is its own clean context.

  • Ask answers questions about the diagram without changing anything.
  • Clean tidies an existing diagram: fixing label typos and normalising sizes, positions, and styles.

If you have elements selected when you send a request, the assistant focuses its attention there while treating the rest of the tab as context, so connected arrows and neighbours stay coherent. For a full walkthrough of each mode, see Ask and Clean.

Working with the results

Clean applies its changes as a single step, so one Undo (Ctrl+Z) reverses the whole AI operation rather than unpicking it element by element. The result is ordinary elements you can edit freely afterwards. (Ask never changes the diagram — it only answers.)

Keep Clean prompts focused on one thing at a time. "Even out the box sizes" gives cleaner results than a long list of unrelated tidy-ups, and it keeps each Undo meaningful.

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