AI Assistance is an optional panel that works alongside you on the canvas. It can draft new structure from a prompt, tidy up an existing diagram, answer questions about what is on the tab, and give feedback on how it reads. It is built around four modes, all driven from a single panel.
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.
- Build drafts new elements from a prompt, and can also edit ones you already have.
- Clean tidies an existing diagram: fixing label typos and normalising sizes, positions, and styles.
- Ask answers questions about the diagram without changing anything.
- Review gives written feedback on the structure and content.
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 Build, Clean, Ask, and Review.
Working with the results
Build and Clean apply their changes as a single step, so one Undo (Ctrl+Z) reverses the whole AI operation rather than unpicking it element by element. Newly generated, connected diagrams are also tidied with an automatic layout pass so boxes are evenly sized and arrows point the right way, regardless of where the model first placed them. The result is ordinary elements you can edit freely afterwards.
Keep prompts focused on one change at a time. "Add a payment step after checkout" gives cleaner results than a long list of unrelated edits, and it keeps each Undo meaningful.
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