Plan Canvas

Plan Canvas

Review loop for plans and visual artifacts: you write the artifact, the human reviews it in the browser — annotating the exact element they mean, chatting, and delivering an Approve plan / Request changes verdict — while you block on a single CLI call that returns their feedback as JSON.

Inspired by lavish-axi; rebuilt ECC-native around the /plan confirmation gate, with zero dependencies.

When to Use

• You just wrote a plan artifact (.claude/plans/*.plan.md from /plan) and need the CONFIRM/approve decision — the canvas verdict replaces a typed "yes/proceed".
• The user should point at what to change: reviewing designs, comparisons, reports, or any local .md / .html artifact.
• The user asks for /plan-canvas, a visual review, or "open it in the browser".

Do NOT use for: code review of diffs (/code-review), running web apps, or remote URLs. The canvas serves local artifact files only.

How It Works

Invoke the CLI as ecc-plan-canvas — the bin shipped by the ecc-universal package (on PATH after a global/plugin install; node "$CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT/scripts/plan-canvas.js" also works for plugin installs). Run it from the project you are reviewing in; it works from any working directory. It manages a detached loopback server (127.0.0.1:4517) shared by all sessions, keyed by artifact path — no session ids to track.

The workflow is a plain CLI-plus-JSON loop, so it is model- and harness-agnostic: any agent that can run a shell command and read stdout drives it the same way (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, OpenCode, Copilot). Trigger it however your harness surfaces skills — e.g. /plan-canvas in Claude Code, $plan-canvas in Codex — or just run the ecc-plan-canvas commands directly.

# 1. Open the artifact in the user's browser (returns immediately)
ecc-plan-canvas open .claude/plans/feature.plan.md

# 2. Block until the human responds. Leave running; re-run if interrupted:
#    queued feedback is never lost.
ecc-plan-canvas await .claude/plans/feature.plan.md

Stay listening, or the human talks to an empty chair

Feedback only reaches you while an await is actually parked on the session. If your turn ends with nothing listening, the message sits in the queue and, from the human's side of the glass, sending appears to do nothing at all.

So run await as a background task when your harness supports one (in Claude Code, a Bash call with run_in_background: true). It exits the moment feedback arrives and the harness hands you the JSON, which keeps the loop alive across turns instead of dying with the foreground call. A foreground await works too, but only until the harness time-limits it.

Two backstops exist, and neither is an excuse to skip the above:

• ecc-plan-canvas pending lists feedback queued with no listener. Check it whenever you are unsure whether you missed something.
• The stop:plan-canvas-pending hook blocks your turn from ending while canvas feedback is undelivered, and hands you the messages. If you are reading feedback from that hook, you stopped listening too early.

await prints JSON when the human acts:

{
  "status": "feedback",
  "items": [
    { "kind": "annotation", "text": "Split this into two phases",
      "anchor": { "selector": "h2:nth-of-type(3)", "tag": "h2", "snippet": "Phase 2: Migration" } },
    { "kind": "verdict", "verdict": "request-changes" }
  ]
}

• kind: "chat" — freeform message; answer in the canvas, not the terminal.
• kind: "annotation" — feedback anchored to an element (anchor.selector, anchor.snippet show what they pointed at; anchor.textRange.text when they highlighted a passage).
• kind: "verdict" — approve means the plan is CONFIRMED: stop polling, end the session, and start implementing. request-changes means revise the artifact (the canvas live-reloads it) and keep the loop going.

3. Always respond in the canvas, then keep listening. One command does both:

ecc-plan-canvas await <file> --reply "Split Phase 2 as requested. Take a look."

Every human message gets a reply in the canvas, even a one-liner like "On it, rewriting the risk table now." Silence in the chat panel is indistinguishable from a broken canvas, which is exactly the failure this loop exists to prevent. Answer there, not only in the terminal.

While you work, keep the chat honest with the activity indicator:

# animated "agent is thinking..." bubble; refresh it during long work
ecc-plan-canvas typing <file> --state thinking
# switch to "agent is typing..." just before a reply lands
ecc-plan-canvas typing <file> --state typing

await sets thinking for you the moment it hands you a batch, and --reply clears it. Both states self-expire, so a crashed agent decays to an honest "queued" instead of leaving the human watching dots forever. Refresh thinking if a revision takes more than a minute.

4. End when review concludes: ecc-plan-canvas end <file>.