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Show HN: Tesseract – 3D architecture editor with MCP for AI-assisted design
Hey HN. I'm David, solo dev, 20+ years shipping production systems. I built Tesseract because AI can analyze your codebase, but the results stay buried in text. Architecture is fundamentally visual — you need to see it, navigate it, drill into it. So I built a 3D canvas where AI can show you what it finds.
Tesseract is a desktop app today (cloud version coming) with a built-in MCP server. You connect it to Claude Code with one command:
claude mcp add tesseract -s user -t http http://localhost:7440/mcp
I use it for onboarding (understand a codebase without reading code), mapping (point AI at code, get a 3D diagram), exploring (navigate layers and drill into subsystems), debugging (trace data flows with animated color-coded paths), and generating (design in 3D, generate code back).
There's also a Claude Code plugin (tesseract-skills) with slash commands: /arch-codemap maps an entire codebase, /arch-flow traces data paths, /arch-detail drills into subsystems.
Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf — any MCP client. Free to use. Sign up to unlock all features for 3 months.
It's early but stable. I've been dogfooding it on real projects for weeks and it's ready for other people to try.
Demo video (1min47): https://youtu.be/YqqtRv17a3M https://youtu.be/YqqtRv17a3M
Docs: https://tesseract.infrastellar.dev/docs https://tesseract.infrastellar.dev/docs
Plugin: https://github.com/infrastellar-dev/tesseract-skills https://github.com/infrastellar-dev/tesseract-skills
Discord: https://discord.gg/vWfW7xExUr https://discord.gg/vWfW7xExUr
Happy to discuss the MCP integration, the design choices, or anything else.
Would love feedback.
- jack_pp 7mo agoWhy did you name it tesseract when there's already a very well known library with the same name?
- infrastellar 7mo agoBecause naming things is one of the two hard problems in computer science — the other being cache invalidation and off-by-one errors. More seriously: Tesseract (the 4D hypercube) felt right for a tool that adds a dimension to how you see architecture. And if you've seen Interstellar, there's a scene where the tesseract reveals the hidden structure behind everything — that's basically what this does for your codebase. I was aware of the OCR library but figured a 40-year-old project can share its name with a newcomer. No one's going to accidentally npm install their way into a 3D architecture editor.