Let’s be honest: the moment Anthropic dropped Claude Design, it felt like magic. You type a prompt, and out comes a polished, artifact-ready design. It was sleek. It was viral. And then, the hangover set in.
Stop Renting Your Design Brain
It’s closed. It’s cloud-only. It’s locked into Anthropic’s ecosystem. You don’t own the workflow; you’re just renting access to their “smartest” model. And if you’ve been following the space, you’ve probably seen Google Stitch try to do the same thing, another walled garden, another subscription, another layer of abstraction between you and your actual code.
I’m done with the walled gardens. That’s why I’ve switched to Open Design.
Here’s the difference: Open Design doesn’t try to be the AI. It doesn’t ship its own bloated agent. Instead, it acts as the ultimate conductor for the agents you already have.
Think about it. You likely already have Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, or Qwen installed on your machine. Open Design detects these 13+ coding-agent CLIs on your PATH and wires them into a professional, skill-driven design workflow. It’s local-first. It’s web-deployable. And it’s Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) at every single layer.
Why this actually matters
When I use Open Design, I’m not sending my proprietary brand assets to a black box in the cloud. I’m running a loop on my own hardware.
- The Prompt Stack is King: Before a single pixel is rendered, an interactive question form pops up. The agent picks from curated visual directions. A live
TodoWriteplan streams into the UI. - Deterministic, Not Random: The daemon builds a real on-disk project folder with seed templates and layout libraries. The agent reads these before it starts. It’s pre-flight enforced.
- Self-Correction: The agent runs a five-dimensional critique against its own output before emitting a single
<artifact>. It behaves like a senior designer with a checklist culture, not a chatbot guessing what “modern” looks like.
Will it replace Claude Design and Google Stitch?
For those who value ownership, privacy, and flexibility? Absolutely.
Claude Design and Google Stitch are great if you want a quick, disposable mockup and don’t care where your data goes. But if you’re building a real product, you need a workflow that integrates with your existing stack, respects your local environment, and doesn’t vanish if your subscription lapses.
Open Design isn’t just an alternative; it’s a correction. It takes the “artifact-first” mental model that Claude Design popularized and strips away the lock-in. It gives you the power of a senior design team, running locally, using the tools you already trust.
Stop renting your creativity. Own your workflow.
Check out Open Design on GitHub. The future of design isn’t in the cloud—it’s on your laptop.
Features
Open Design: Core FeaturesAgent Agnostic & Local-First
- Auto-Detects 13+ CLIs: Seamlessly integrates with Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini, Qwen, Copilot, and more from your PATH.
- BYOK Proxy: No CLI? Use the OpenAI-compatible proxy to bring your own API keys (Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure, Google).
- Local Daemon: Runs on your machine with real filesystem access (Read/Write/Bash), ensuring data privacy and zero cloud lock-in.
Professional Design Workflow
- Pre-Flight Briefing: Interactive forms lock in audience, tone, and context before generation begins.
- Curated Visual Directions: Choose from 5 deterministic design schools (e.g., Editorial Monocle, Brutalist) with fixed palettes and fonts.
- 31 Composable Skills: Ready-to-use templates for web prototypes, mobile apps, dashboards, pitch decks, emails, and social carousels.
- 72 Brand-Grade Design Systems: Built-in support for Linear, Stripe, Vercel, Apple, Notion, and more.
Artifact-First Output
- Live Todo Streaming: Watch the agent’s plan execute in real-time with interruptible generation.
- Sandboxed Preview: Renders artifacts in a clean iframe for instant visual feedback and editing.
- Multi-Format Export: Download as HTML, PDF, PPTX, ZIP, or Markdown.
- Media Generation: Integrated support for image (GPT-Image-2), video (Seedance 2.0), and motion graphics (HyperFrames).
Developer Experience
- Self-Correction: Agents run a five-dimensional critique against their own output before finalizing.
- Persistent State: SQLite-backed sessions allow you to pick up exactly where you left off.
- Extensible: Drop-in
.pyskills and custom design systems via simple folder structures. - Deployable: Run locally via
pnpm tools-devor deploy the web layer to Vercel.
License
Apache-2.0 license
