About Open Design
The open-source alternative to Claude Design. Local-first, web-deployable, BYOK at every layer — 16 coding-agent CLIs auto-detected on your PATH (Claude Code, Codex, Devin for Terminal, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Qwen, Qoder CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, Hermes, Kimi, Pi, Kiro, Kilo, Mistral Vibe, DeepSeek TUI) become the design engine, driven by 31 composable Skills and 72 brand-grade Design Systems. No CLI? An OpenAI-compatible BYOK proxy is the same loop minus the spawn.
Why this exists
Anthropic's Claude Design (released 2026-04-17, Opus 4.7) showed what happens when an LLM stops writing prose and starts shipping design artifacts. It went viral — and stayed closed-source, paid-only, cloud-only, locked to Anthropic's model and Anthropic's skills. There is no checkout, no self-host, no Vercel deploy, no swap-in-your-own-agent.
Open Design (OD) is the open-source alternative. Same loop, same artifact-first mental model, none of the lock-in. We don't ship an agent — the strongest coding agents already live on your laptop. We wire them into a skill-driven design workflow that runs locally with pnpm tools-dev, can deploy the web layer to Vercel, and stays BYOK at every layer.
Type make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round. The interactive question form pops up before the model improvises a single pixel. The agent picks one of five curated visual directions. A live TodoWrite plan streams into the UI. The daemon builds a real on-disk project folder with a seed template, layout library, and self-check checklist. The agent reads them — pre-flight enforced — runs a five-dimensional critique against its own output, and emits a single <artifact> that renders in a sandboxed iframe seconds later.
That's not "AI tries to design something". That's an AI that has been trained, by the prompt stack, to behave like a senior designer with a working filesystem, a deterministic palette library, and a checklist culture — exactly the bar Claude Design set, but open and yours.
OD stands on four open-source shoulders:
- alchaincyf/huashu-design — the design-philosophy compass. Junior-Designer workflow, the 5-step brand-asset protocol, the anti-AI-slop checklist, the 5-dimensional self-critique, and the "5 schools × 20 design philosophies" idea behind our direction picker — all distilled into apps/daemon/src/prompts/discovery.ts.
- op7418/guizang-ppt-skill — the deck mode. Bundled verbatim under skills/guizang-ppt/ with original LICENSE preserved; magazine-style layouts, WebGL hero, P0/P1/P2 checklists.
- OpenCoworkAI/open-codesign — the UX north star and our closest peer. The first open-source Claude-Design alternative. We borrow its streaming-artifact loop, its sandboxed-iframe preview pattern (vendored React 18 + Babel), its live agent panel (todos + tool calls + interruptible generation), and its five-format export list (HTML / PDF / PPTX / ZIP / Markdown). We deliberately diverge on form factor — they are a desktop Electron app bundling pi-ai; we are a web app + local daemon that delegates to your existing CLI.
- multica-ai/multica — the daemon-and-runtime architecture. PATH-scan agent detection, the local daemon as the only privileged process, the agent-as-teammate worldview.
