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Get a real diagram.

A free skill that teaches Claude Code or Codex to draw proper Excalidraw diagrams — flowcharts, wireframes, slide decks, business canvases — right in your own Excalidraw workspace.

What it does

"Draw me a flowchart of our customer onboarding."
"Turn these notes into a SWOT board."
"Wireframe the new landing page, then make it a 5-slide deck."

You type a sentence like one of those. Your AI assistant opens your Excalidraw+ workspace, draws the diagram in Excalidraw's friendly hand-drawn style, checks its own work with a screenshot, and hands you a link. The drawing is fully editable — move boxes, change words, share it with your team, just like any whiteboard you made yourself.

No design tools to learn. No dragging boxes around. You describe; it draws.

Install in three steps

Step 1 — Get your Excalidraw key. Sign in at app.excalidraw.com (Excalidraw+), open Settings → API keys, and create a key. Copy it somewhere safe — treat it like a password.

Step 2 — Add the skill. Paste this into your terminal (the same place you run Claude Code or Codex):

npx skills add NicholasSpisak/excalidraw

That's the skills installer — it sets things up for Claude Code, Codex, and most other AI coding assistants in one go.

Step 3 — Tell it your key. Run these two lines once, then restart your terminal:

mkdir -p ~/.config/excalidraw && printf '%s\n' 'YOUR-KEY-HERE' > ~/.config/excalidraw/api_key

Your key stays in one private file on your computer — never in any project or code you share.

Optional: native MCP setup (for the technically curious)

The skill works out of the box. If you prefer wiring the official Excalidraw MCP server directly into your assistant:

Claude Code — add to ~/.claude.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "excalidraw": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://api.excalidraw.com/api/v1/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer <API_KEY>" }
    }
  }
}

Codex — add to ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.excalidraw]
url = "https://api.excalidraw.com/api/v1/mcp"
env_http_headers = { Authorization = "EXCALIDRAW_API_KEY" }

Full details in the README on GitHub.

What it can draw

All seventeen of Excalidraw's official use cases, each with its own layout playbook baked in:

Explain systems

  • Flowcharts
  • Software architecture
  • Sequence diagrams
  • Data-flow diagrams
  • UML diagrams

Plan the business

  • Lean Canvas
  • SWOT analysis
  • Competitor analysis
  • Roadmaps
  • Gantt charts

Design things

  • Wireframes & mockups
  • Presentations & slide decks
  • Game design boards

Think together

  • Mind maps
  • Brainstorming boards
  • User personas
  • Interview whiteboards
  • Teaching canvases

Every drawing lands in your own workspace, gets screenshot-checked before it's called done, and comes back as a shareable link.

Like putting AI to work like this?

This skill is one small example of what happens when business owners get practical with AI. That's the whole idea behind AI Operator Academy — a community where owners learn to turn AI into real systems (and real revenue), no engineering degree required.

Take a look at the Academy →