OpenDesign 🧩 Skill Freemium

What it does

OpenDesign (OD) is an open-source, local-first design workspace that uses the coding agent you already have as its design engine. You give it a brief, pick a design system and an artifact type, and your agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor's agent, Copilot and others) generates real HTML, CSS and component files, which OD previews in a sandboxed frame. It presents itself as an open alternative to Anthropic's Claude Design. It ships as a desktop app for macOS and Windows and can also run in Docker or from source.

What is inside

• Artifact types: web, desktop and mobile prototypes, slide decks, live dashboards, documents, images, and HyperFrames motion graphics rendered to MP4
• Design systems: about 150 DESIGN.md brand packages that every render follows, plus tools to extract a system from your own brand references
• Skills, templates and plugins: functional skills, rendering templates and a plugin catalog, all stored as portable folders
• Exports: HTML, PDF, PPTX, ZIP and Markdown
• Agent access: an od CLI and an MCP server, so agents can list projects, read files and apply plugins without the GUI
• Code refresh: plugins that apply a DESIGN.md to an existing React, Next.js or Vue repository

Works with

The README lists one-command MCP setup for Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, GitHub Copilot (VS Code and CLI), OpenCode, Antigravity, Cline, Trae, Kiro and several other agents. A bring-your-own-key proxy covers direct model APIs.

How to install

Download the desktop app from the website or GitHub Releases. Then connect your agent with the od CLI, for example:

od mcp install claude

On macOS, the system od utility can shadow this command. The README suggests copying the MCP snippet from the app's settings instead.

Maintenance and safety

The code is Apache-2.0 licensed and updated daily. Bundled templates keep their own licences. It runs locally with your own keys, and an optional paid OpenDesign Cloud service sells model credits. Agents it launches write files in the working directory you choose. The curl installer pipes a shell script, so read it first.

Who should use it

Developers and designers who want AI-generated prototypes, decks and design-system-driven UI without a closed, single-vendor design tool.