Open Design - A Local-First Open Source Alternative to Claude Design

Open Design is a local-first open source design tool aiming to replace Claude Design.

Rather than embedding its own agent, it auto-detects 16 coding agent CLIs on the user's PATH—such as Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI—and uses them as its design engine.

On the first turn, it forces an interactive question form to lock down surface, audience, tone, brand, and scale first, then applies one of 5 visual directions (Editorial Monocle, Modern Minimal, Tech Utility, Brutalist, Soft Warm) along with a deterministic OKLch palette and font stack.

• 31 skills: web prototypes, SaaS landing pages, dashboards, mobile apps, social carousels, magazine posters, PM specs, OKRs, invoices, and more
• 129 design systems: provided as DESIGN.md files for Linear, Stripe, Vercel, Airbnb, Tesla, Notion, Apple, Cursor, Supabase, Figma, and others
• Media generation: includes gpt-image-2, Seedance 2.0, HyperFrames, and a gallery of 93 prompt templates
• Anti AI-slop mechanisms: 5-dimensional self-critique, P0/P1/P2 checklist gates, a rule against guessing brand colors from memory, and a rule against fake metrics

A local daemon launches the CLI within the project folder to perform Read/Write/Bash/WebFetch on the actual filesystem, and uses SQLite to remember project, conversation, and tab state. It also supports sandboxed iframe previews, HTML/PDF/PPTX/ZIP/Markdown export, Claude Design ZIP import, direct reads by other coding agents via a stdio MCP server, a BYOK proxy (Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama, LM Studio), and SSRF blocking.

It can be run in 3 ways—desktop app, Docker, or from source—and is licensed under Apache-2.0.