Open Design ships an open-source clone of Claude Design that wires into your local coding CLI

Open Design (OD) is an open-source response to Anthropic’s Claude Design, the closed, paid, cloud-only artifact-generation tool released in April 2026. Rather than shipping its own model, OD scans the user’s PATH for 12 known coding-agent CLIs — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, Copilot CLI, and others — and drives whichever it finds over stdio as the design engine. Users without a CLI installed can route through an OpenAI-compatible BYOK proxy that runs the same pipeline minus the subprocess spawn, with loopback and private-range destinations blocked at the edge.

The workflow is built around 31 composable Skills (following Claude Code’s SKILL.md convention with an extended od: frontmatter) and 72 brand-grade design systems sourced from the DESIGN.md schema project. Before the agent generates anything, a discovery question form locks down surface, audience, tone, and constraints; the agent then runs against a real on-disk project folder with Read/Write/Bash/WebFetch tools, executes a five-dimensional self-critique, and emits artifacts rendered in a sandboxed iframe. Sessions persist in local SQLite, and exports cover HTML, PDF, PPTX, ZIP, and Markdown.

OD positions itself as a BYOK, local-first, web-deployable alternative that explicitly credits and vendors prior work — huashu-design for the prompt philosophy, guizang-ppt-skill for deck mode, open-codesign for the streaming-artifact UX, and multica for the daemon architecture. The bet is that the strongest agents already live on developer laptops, and the missing piece is a skill-driven harness that turns them into deterministic design tools rather than freestyle prose generators.