Open Design: Local Prototypes with Any Model

The Breakthrough

Open Design delivers full prototypes, apps, and decks locally by combining 72 brand-inspired design systems with output-specific skills and any installed coding agent or model, bypassing Claude Design's proprietary lock-in.

What Actually Worked

• Users clone the repo and run from source to access a browser UI that auto-detects installed agents like Claude Code, CodeX, or Open Code, then select a model such as GLM-4.1 and adjust settings like reasoning effort or memory instructions.
• Select a design system like Mirror (with exposed tokens for typography, spacing, colors) and output type such as prototype; provide a prompt like 'well-designed simple website for a product I can use to search YouTube channels' plus a URL to an existing app.
• Answer pre-generation questions on audience, visual tone, brand, and context; the agent uses tools like curl, Chrome, and agent browser to inspect the site, scrape data, and generate pages including search with filters, results, favorites, and hidden lists.
• After generation (around 20 minutes for GLM-4.1), review five output files in responsive views, then finalize into a design and .def file synthesizing the transcript, system, and artifacts.
• Export as standalone HTML, share in multiple formats, or deploy directly to Vercel or Cloudflare Pages; add features like dark mode via follow-up prompts.

Context

Claude Design offers strong front-end generation but requires a $20/month subscription, cloud access, and its single model. Open Design, shipped by Tom and the Nexa team 11 days after Claude's release, runs everything locally with built-in anti-AI checklists and skills tailored to outputs like dashboards or slides. The demo redesigns a basic YouTube channel searcher into a polished app with real data integration using a non-front-end-specialist model, proving viability for users with existing agents. It suits those with some design knowledge for quick iterations, unlike Impeccable's upfront image-based planning.

Notable Quotes

• "Open Design contains many of these design systems with full brand specs typography spacing and color tokens inspired from brands like Linear Stripe and Spotify."
• "There's even an anti-AII checklist baked into every prompt and before it generates anything it asks you about your audience tone and brand content."
• "After around 20 minutes yeah GLM 5.1 is not the fastest model everything is finished."
• "The combination of design systems and skills means that it can actually produce something pretty decent regardless of the harness or model."

Content References

None provided in the specified format.