For the past 25 days, I’ve been pivoting my side project, CanvasDesk. The short version: I want to turn the desktop from a static, “dead” part of the operating system into something genuinely useful. The desktop is always in front of us. Why not make it an infinite canvas?
I decided to test the idea with a proof of concept: an infinite canvas board instead of a traditional desktop.
I also wanted to answer another question: how realistic is it to build a serious project in Rust — one of the most complex systems programming languages — using AI agents? Four years ago, while working on an internal mobile ecosystem for employees at Svyaznoy (formerly Euroset), I tried Rust out, alongside Python for scripting and Flutter for mobile development.
To build the PoC, I spent $80 on a Kimi Code subscription, learned to use Z.ai AI agents more effectively, and put in about 2.5 weeks and more than 3,000 requests to AI agents. The result: a working binary for Windows, Linux, and macOS, plus a WebAssembly version in the browser: try it here.
The Missing Piece: Math on the Canvas
As someone with visual-spatial thinking, I love online whiteboards. They’re great — except for one missing piece: they’ve never really supported mathematical calculations.
Over 10 years in IT and product management, I’ve seen the same pain in myself and in colleagues — product managers, architects, analysts: a fragmented path from design to calculations to defending those calculations.
A simple example: we design a product, map out its business and technical architecture on a board, and then we have to go to Excel to calculate the economics, system throughput, and infrastructure. We tweak something in Excel, then move all the changes back to the board. Synchronization hell.
So I thought: if not me, who?
Why Me
I started my career managing a software development team for mathematical modeling for Sukhoi Superjet 100 aviation simulators. Over 10 years, I moved from managing development and support to developing an e-commerce platform and finding market opportunities for AI products in an R&D lab.
That path led me to CanvasDesk: a tool where the diagram is the formula.
What’s Next
In my next posts, I’ll share what already works and what comes next.
If you’d like to follow the build, here are the links:
Project page: https://github.com/danku13/CanvasDesk
WASM web version: https://danku13.github.io/CanvasDesk/app/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniil-kuzmichev-31836b101/
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