Anthropic's Claude Design went viral in April. LLMs can ship real design artifacts, not just text. But it's closed source. Cloud only. Locked to Anthropic's models.
Open Design, a new Apache 2.0 project on GitHub, replicates that artifact-first workflow with none of the lock-in. It auto-detects coding agent CLIs already on your machine (Claude Code, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, Codex, Kiro, and more) and wires them into a skill-driven design pipeline that runs locally.
The project builds on four open-source predecessors. It draws design philosophy from huashu-design, deck layouts from guizang-ppt, streaming artifact patterns from open-codesign, and the daemon runtime from multica. It ships 31 composable Skills covering scenarios from SaaS landing pages to pitch decks and finance reports. 129 design systems from real products like Linear, Stripe, Vercel, and Notion come bundled.
Request a design and an interactive form appears before the model generates a single pixel. The agent picks from curated visual directions, builds a project folder with templates and layout libraries, runs a five-dimensional self-critique on its output, then emits a single artifact that renders in a sandboxed iframe. The goal: make the AI operate like a senior designer with a checklist culture, avoiding AI-generated visual slop.
BYOK means bring your own key. Plug in any OpenAI-compatible provider. DeepSeek, Groq, OpenRouter, or your own self-hosted vLLM instance. Everything runs on your hardware.
Community feedback on Claude Design has noted that building full websites is token-intensive and slow compared to image-based prototyping tools. Open Design's local execution and modular skill system targets those cost and efficiency concerns directly.