PenEcho Agent - Canvas AI agent

Introduction I've wanted to add an agent to PenEcho's canvas for quite a while. DeepSeek Harness felt like a good fit because of its plugin based architecture, so I integrated it as the local agent runtime behind PenEcho Agent. The result worked out better than I expected. Instead of only answering in chat, the agent can inspect the current canvas, understand drawings and existing content, discuss a rough idea with the user, and then create or edit the result directly on the canvas. How PenEcho integrates with DeepSeek Harness PenEcho registers a bounded set of Canvas tools with Harness. These tools allow the agent to: inspect and capture the current canvas read existing canvas content create visual explanations, diagrams, charts, and interactive demonstrations edit or patch existing canvas content move the viewport and visually check its own work revert an unsuccessful canvas change The canvas remains under PenEcho's control. Tool inputs and canvas mutations are validated before they are applied. The agent can also work with PDFs, Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint files, images, and code. Users may select a local file or folder as additional context. Local resource access is read only. A typical workflow looks like this: The user draws something on the canvas or adds a document. The user explains the rough idea in the chat panel. Harness reads the relevant canvas and file context. The agent turns the idea into a visual result on the canvas. It captures the result, checks the layout, and makes further edits when needed. A lot of the implementation work went into producing readable visual output instead of generic card layouts. PenEcho includes tools for professional charts, visual explanations, and interactive physics demonstrations, while Harness manages the agent loop, conversation context, tool calls, and model interaction. I've had especially good results with deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp. DeepSeek's lack of multimodal support had previously been a limitation for this use case, but this model handles images and canvas context surprisingly well. PenEcho is free and open source. It can run locally, while the optional cloud service provides canvas storage and access to a linked local canvas from other devices. Feedback on the integration is welcome, especially suggestions for new visual tools, file workflows, or better ways to expose Canvas capabilities through Harness plugins.