Open Design

The open-source alternative to [Claude Design][cd]. Local-first, web-deployable, BYOK at every layer — your existing coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Qwen, GitHub Copilot CLI) becomes the design engine, driven by 19 composable Skills and 71 brand-grade Design Systems.

Why this exists

Anthropic's [Claude Design][cd] (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 on pnpm dev, deploys 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 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][piai]; 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.