by nexu-io
🎨 Local-first, open-source alternative to Anthropic's Claude Design. ⚡ 19 Skills · ✨ 71 brand-grade Design Systems · 🖼️ sandboxed preview · 📦 HTML/PDF/PPTX export. 🤖 Runs on Claude Code / Codex / Cursor / Gemini CLI / OpenCode / Qwen / Copilot / Hermes / Kimi CLI.
# Add to your Claude Code skills
git clone https://github.com/nexu-io/open-designGuides for using ai agents skills like open-design.
Last scanned: 4/29/2026
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}The open-source alternative to [Claude Design][cd]. Local-first, web-deployable, BYOK at every layer — 11 coding-agent CLIs auto-detected on your
PATH(Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Qwen, GitHub Copilot CLI, Hermes, Kimi, Pi, Kiro) 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.
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 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/web/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.| What you get | |
|---|---|
| Coding-agent CLIs (11) | Claude Code · Codex CLI · Cursor Agent · Gemini CLI · OpenCode · Qwen Code · GitHub Copilot CLI · Hermes (ACP) · Kimi CLI (ACP) · Pi (RPC) · Kiro CLI (ACP) — auto-detected on PATH, swap with one click |
| BYOK fallback | OpenAI-compatible proxy at /api/proxy/stream — paste baseUrl + apiKey + model and any vendor (Anthropic-via-OpenAI, DeepSeek, Groq, MiMo, OpenRouter, your self-hosted vLLM, or any other OpenAI-compatible provider) becomes the engine. Internal-IP/SSRF blocked at the daemon edge. |
| Design systems built-in | 72 — 2 hand-authored starters + 70 product systems (Linear, Stripe, Vercel, Airbnb, Tesla, Notion, Anthropic, Apple, Cursor, Supabase, Figma, Xiaohongshu, …) imported from awesome-design-md |
| Skills built-in | 31 — 27 in prototype mode (web-prototype, saas-landing, dashboard, mobile-app, gamified-app, social-carousel, magazine-poster, dating-web, sprite-animation, motion-frames, critique, tweaks, wireframe-sketch, pm-spec, eng-runbook, finance-report, hr-onboarding, invoice, kanban-board, team-okrs, …) + 4 in deck mode (guizang-ppt · simple-deck · replit-deck · weekly-update). Grouped in the picker by scenario: design / marketing / operation / engineering / product / finance / hr / sale / personal. |
| Visual directions | 5 curated schools (Editorial Monocle · Modern Minimal · Warm Soft · Tech Utility · Brutalist Experimental) — each ships a deterministic OKLch palette + font stack (apps/web/src/prompts/directions.ts) |
| Device frames | iPhone 15 Pro · Pixel · iPad Pro · MacBook · Browser Chrome — pixel-accurate, shared across skills under assets/frames/ |
| Agent runtime | Local daemon spawns the CLI in your project folder — agent gets real Read, Write, Bash, WebFetch against a real on-disk environment, with Windows ENAMETOOLONG fallbacks (stdin / prompt-file) on every adapter |
| Imports | Drop a [Claude Design][cd] export ZIP onto the welcome dialog — POST /api/import/claude-design parses it into a real project so your agent can keep editing where Anthropic left off |
| Persistence | SQLite at .od/app.sqlite: projects · conversations · messages · tabs · saved templates. Reopen tomorrow, todo card and open files are exactly where you left them. |
| Lifecycle | One entry point: pnpm tools-dev (start / stop / run / status / logs / inspect / check) — boots daemon + web (+ desktop) under typed sidecar stamps |
| Desktop | Optional Electron shell with sandboxed renderer + sidecar IPC (STATUS / EVAL / SCREENSHOT / CONSOLE / CLICK / SHUTDOWN) — drives tools-dev inspect desktop screenshot for E2E |
| Deployable to | Local (pnpm tools-dev) · Vercel web layer · packaged Electron (placeholder, in-flight) |
| License | Apache-2.0 |
open-design is an open-source ai agents skill for AI coding assistants such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, and ChatGPT, built by nexu-io. 🎨 Local-first, open-source alternative to Anthropic's Claude Design. ⚡ 19 Skills · ✨ 71 brand-grade Design Systems · 🖼️ sandboxed preview · 📦 HTML/PDF/PPTX export. 🤖 Runs on Claude Code / Codex / Cursor / Gemini CLI / OpenCode / Qwen / Copilot / Hermes / Kimi CLI. It has 8,925 GitHub stars.
Yes. open-design passed SkillsLLM's automated security scan — a dependency vulnerability audit plus prompt-injection heuristics — with no high-severity issues. You can read the full report in the Security Report section on this page.
Clone the repository with "git clone https://github.com/nexu-io/open-design" and add it to your Claude Code skills directory (see the Installation section above).
open-design is primarily written in TypeScript. It is open-source under nexu-io on GitHub, so you can review or fork the full source.
Yes. SkillsLLM lists many other AI Agents skills you can browse and compare side by side. Open the AI Agents category from the badge at the top of this page, or use the Related Skills and comparison links further down to weigh open-design against similar tools.
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