Open Design: Open-Source Alternative to Claude Design Runs on Your Local CLI Agents
Open Design (OD) is an open-source alternative to Anthropic's Claude Design, released 2026-04-17 on Opus 4.7. Unlike the closed-source, paid-only, cloud-only original, OD is local-first, web-deployable, and BYOK at every layer. It auto-detects 11 coding-agent CLIs on your PATH—Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Qwen, GitHub Copilot CLI, Hermes, Kimi, Pi, Kiro—and wires them into a skill-driven design workflow. No CLI? An OpenAI-compatible BYOK proxy works the same loop without the spawn.
Key Features
- 72 brand-grade Design Systems and 31 composable Skills (including bundled
skills/guizang-ppt-skillfrom op7418/guizang-ppt-skill for magazine-style decks with WebGL hero and P0/P1/P2 checklists) - 5-step brand-asset protocol from alchaincyf/huashu-design, with anti-AI-slop checklist and 5-dimensional self-critique; direction picker offers 5 schools × 20 design philosophies
- Live TodoWrite plan streams into the UI; agent builds a real on-disk project folder with seed template, layout library, and self-check checklist
- Sandboxed iframe preview (vendored React 18 + Babel) with live agent panel showing todos, tool calls, and interruptible generation
- Export to HTML, PDF, PPTX, ZIP, Markdown
- Runs locally via
pnpm tools-dev; web layer deployable to Vercel
Architecture
OD stands on four open-source projects: huashu-design (design philosophy), guizang-ppt-skill (deck mode), open-codesign (streaming artifact loop, live preview), and multica (daemon-and-runtime, PATH-scan age). The prompt stack trains the LLM to behave like a senior designer with a working filesystem, deterministic palette library, and checklist culture.
Typical workflow: prompt like "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" triggers an interactive question form, the agent picks one of five curated visual directions, streams a TodoWrite plan, builds a project folder, runs pre-flight checks, performs a five-dimensional critique, and emits a single <artifact> rendered in a sandboxed iframe.
Who It's For
Developers who already use AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) and want a local, open-source design engine without cloud lock-in or per-seat fees.
📖 Read the full source: HN AI Agents
👀 See Also
Parallel Coding Agents with tmux and Markdown Specs
Manuel Schipper describes a system for running 4-8 parallel coding agents using tmux, Markdown files, bash aliases, and six slash commands. The setup uses Feature Design (FD) Markdown specs tracked through an 8-stage lifecycle.
Self-Evolving Skill pattern validation: 5-round experiment results
A developer tested the Self-Evolving Skill design pattern for Claude Code with a 5-round experiment on a MySQL database with 29 tables and 590MB of smart building management data. Key results include a 63.6% Five-Gate rejection rate, incremental convergence, and 100% accuracy with no incorrect knowledge surviving.
Claude adds interactive chart and diagram creation feature
Claude can now generate interactive visuals including charts, diagrams, and explorable breakdowns directly within conversations. The feature is available in beta across all plans including free tier.
SimplePDF Copilot: Client-Side AI Tool Calling for PDF Form Filling
SimplePDF Copilot uses client-side tool calling to let an LLM fill fields, add fields, delete pages, and more in PDFs — without the PDF leaving the browser.