Connect an AI Tool (MCP)

You need an account

Connecting an AI tool is a signed-in-only feature, the same as API tokens and teams. The canvas, sharing, and real-time collaboration stay account-free for guests, but driving your documents programmatically is an advanced, opt-in capability that needs an account. On a self-hosted instance that hasn't enabled accounts, or hasn't deployed the MCP server, the feature isn't available.

What the AI can do

The connection gives your AI tool these tools:

• Find documents: search your documents by name, across your personal library and the shared libraries of every team you belong to.
• Read a document: get a tab's contents as a text outline, and a picture of it when the AI asks for one.
• List templates: browse the same hand-tuned template library the editor's Quick Start offers.
• Create a document: turn a request into a new document, with one tab or several. A tab can start from a template: ask for "a kanban board" and the AI can lay down the curated scaffold, then fill in your content.
• Add a tab: add another tab (its own canvas) to an existing document, for example a detail view of one part. Tabs can start from a template too.
• Update a document: rework a whole tab or make a small adjustment.
• Share a document: turn a document into a share link to hand to someone. Unless you ask for another level, the AI makes a Participant link: people can add stickies, write and vote, but not reshape the board.
• Rename a document and Delete a document: tidy your library from the AI tool, a whole document or a single tab. Deleting a document moves it to the Trash; deleting a tab removes it for good.
• List the Trash and Restore a document: bring back something deleted by mistake, by you or by the AI.
• List items and Change items: read and update the cards on a document's Plan boards (add a task, move it to another column, change its fields). The AI names things the way your board shows them, so it says "In Progress" or "Bug" or "Severity", and livediagram refuses a column, card type or field the document doesn't have instead of filing a card where no board shows it.
• Add a board and Change a board: put a Plan board on a tab, from a ready-made one (Kanban, Sprint, Bug Triage...) or with the columns you name, and later rename it, change its columns or choose which card types it shows.
• List sheets, Read a sheet, Change a sheet and Add a sheet: work with the Sheets on a document's tabs, reading cells by A1 address, setting values and formulas, formatting, sorting, and adding a new sheet from rows or CSV.
• Change pages and Write an article: make Illustrate pages. Ask for a deck and the AI adds slides, from the same slide layouts the page panel offers, then fills in their text; ask for a logo and it adds a logo artboard; ask for an infographic and it lays one out. Ask it to write something up and it writes an article, in Markdown, which flows onto as many pages as it needs when you open it. It can also read an article back, edit it and write it again.
• Change card types: add, edit or delete the card types a document's boards hold, with their own fields. Deleting a type moves its cards to the Trash, as it does in the editor.

For building the picture, the AI can just describe the graph (the nodes and what connects to what) and livediagram lays it out, so the tool doesn't have to work out coordinates. It only needs to say what exists and what links to what, or hand over the same thing as Mermaid text (a flowchart, state diagram, or ER diagram). It can group related boxes into labelled sections and choose a flow, a tree (an org chart), or a mind map. Box labels are kept to short headings: when the AI writes a long sentence, the box shows the heading and the full text goes into the box's note, so a chatty AI doesn't fill your diagram with paragraphs.

Beyond plain boxes and arrows, the AI can fill in sticky notes (in the sticky colours), tables, code blocks, entities (a titled record with field rows, for data models), swimlanes, bar, line, and pie charts, and Sankey diagrams (from a list of flows: what moves from where to where, and how much). Your AI tool may also surface a few ready-made prompts ("Diagram this", "Flowchart from steps" and "Show my document") as quick actions, so you don't have to know the tool names.

When the AI changes a document you have open, you see it happen: the change arrives on your canvas straight away, outlined for a moment in your colour, and a note at the bottom says what changed. Show takes you to it and Undo puts it back (your own Undo shortcut only ever undoes your own edits). Anything you change at the same time is kept. To review or undo a change after its note has gone, see Reviewing and Undoing an Agent's Changes. An element someone else in the document has selected is off limits: a change that touches it is refused, and the AI is told to leave it out or try again later.

The AI does the thinking; livediagram validates, lays out, saves, and renders what it produces. The MCP server runs no AI model of its own. New documents an AI creates land at the root of My documents (or your default folder, if you set one), each with a Made by AI badge; the Made by AI filter lists them all, wherever you file them.