The open-source alternative to Claude Design. Your existing coding agent — Claude · Codex · Cursor · Gemini · OpenCode · Qwen — becomes the design engine, driven by 31 composable skills and 72 brand-grade design systems.
The strongest coding agents already live on your laptop. We don't ship one — we wire them into a skill-driven design workflow that runs locally with pnpm tools-dev, deploys the web layer to Vercel, and stays BYOK at every layer.
Read our approach
We blend human taste with whichever agent you already trust to ship interfaces, decks, and editorial pages that feel intentional, expressive, and alive.
31 file-based SKILL.md bundles. Drop a folder in, restart the daemon, it appears.
72 portable DESIGN.md systems — Linear, Vercel, Stripe, Apple, Cursor, Figma…
Editorial-grade slide decks with guizang-ppt. Magazine layout, WebGL hero.
Gpt-image-2 + Seedance + HyperFrames. Image, video, audio — same chat surface as code.
The interactive question form pops before a single pixel is improvised. 30s of radios beats 30min of redirects.
Every stage is iterative, visual, and research-driven — composable files, not opaque prompts.
The daemon scans your $PATH for 12 coding agents and auto-loads 31 skills + 72 systems on boot.
Turn 1 is a question form — surface, audience, tone, scale, brand context. Locked in 30 seconds.
Pick one of 5 deterministic visual directions. Palette in OKLch, font stack, layout posture cues.
The agent writes to disk, you preview in a sandboxed iframe, export HTML / PDF / PPTX / ZIP / Markdown.
Open Design is an open-source, skill-driven design workflow that turns your existing coding agent — Claude, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, OpenCode, Qwen — into a full creative design engine. It ships composable SKILL.md bundles and portable DESIGN.md systems so you can generate interfaces, decks, and editorial pages locally without switching tools.
Open Design is an independent open-source project licensed under Apache-2.0. It is not affiliated with Anthropic, OpenAI, or any single AI vendor. The canonical source is the GitHub repository at github.com/nexu-io/open-design.
Claude Design is a closed, first-party product from Anthropic. Open Design is the open-source alternative: it supports 12 different coding agents (not just Claude), runs entirely on your machine, uses file-based skills you can fork and edit, and stays BYOK — bring your own key — at every layer.
Yes. The daemon runs on your laptop via pnpm tools-dev. No cloud dependency is required for the design workflow itself. The web preview layer can optionally deploy to Vercel, but the core loop — detect agents, load skills, generate artifacts — is fully local.
Currently 12 agents are auto-detected on $PATH: Claude, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, Copilot, OpenCode, Devin, Hermes, Pi, Kimi, Kiro, and Qwen. Adding a new adapter is a single file contribution.
Absolutely. The entire project is Apache-2.0 licensed. You can fork the repo, add your own skills and design systems, swap the LLM provider via the OpenAI-compatible proxy, and deploy wherever you want — Vercel, Fly, your own VPS, or air-gapped on-prem.
Skills are file-based SKILL.md bundles (currently 31) that teach the agent a specific creative capability — magazine decks, visual critique, prompt choreography, etc. Design systems are portable DESIGN.md files (currently 72) encoding brand-grade tokens like those of Linear, Vercel, Stripe, Apple, and more.
Yes. Open Design is free and open-source under Apache-2.0. You bring your own API keys for the underlying LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Groq, OpenRouter, or self-hosted vLLM). The project itself charges nothing.
Video walkthroughs from independent creators covering setup, comparisons with Claude Design, vibe-coding workflows, and the engine internals. Embedded here so you never leave the page.
Better Stack breaks down the key differences between Open Design and Claude Design. Covers self-hosting advantages, BYOK architecture, multi-agent support (12 agents vs Claude-only), and why open-source wins for engineering teams that need full control over their design toolchain.
WorldofAI walks through the full Open Design architecture — the daemon, skills system, 72 design systems, and composable templates. Includes a live demo building a landing page from scratch using only a text brief and the local-first workflow.
Sean Kochel demonstrates how Open Design fits into a vibe-coding workflow — rapid iteration loops, real-time sandboxed preview, and shipping production-ready artifacts in minutes. Shows the creative potential when design skills meet coding agents.
CodeDigiPT explores the engine layer in depth — how SKILL.md bundles compose, how design tokens flow from DESIGN.md through the agent to pixel-perfect output, and how to add custom skills and adapters for new agents.
Star us on GitHub, drop into the issues, or run pnpm tools-dev tonight. Three commands and the loop is yours.
