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
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Merlin: Local-first LLM context dedup – measure up to 71% chunk overlap, free & open-core
Merlin is a local-first context dedup tool that measured 22-71% chunk overlap across 22M passages from real agent/RAG sessions. Ships as HTTP proxy (Ollama/vLLM/SGLang/llama.cpp), MCP server (Claude/Cursor/OpenClaw), or standalone CLI. MIT open-core with daily usage caps.
Open-source CLI uses Claude Haiku to automate Xero expense auditing
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MCP-Loci: Local Persistent Memory Server for Claude and MCP-Compatible AI
MCP-Loci is a persistent memory server that solves Claude's session-based memory limitation with five tools: remember, recall, forget, synthesize, and health. It uses hybrid BM25 keyword matching and semantic embeddings for accurate recall without requiring API keys.