Introducing OpenDesign

There is a new class of tools that turn a prompt into a working interface. They are genuinely good. They are also, almost without exception, closed: you rent access, you work against a weekly allowance, and everything you make travels to someone else's servers. If you want to run the thing on your own model, or keep your work entirely on your own disk, there has not really been an option.

OpenDesign is that option. It is an open-source, local-first desktop app (an open alternative to Claude Design) that generates UI from your models and hands you back real code. No account. No allowance. Bring your own key.

Why we built it

The gap was specific. Plenty of open-source projects can call a model. Plenty of design tools have a canvas. But there was no open, integrated design surface: a real workspace where you go from an idea to a rendered screen to exportable code, on your own hardware, without handing the whole session to a vendor.

We wanted three things to be true at once, and none of them were:

1. It runs locally. Your project, your prompts, your output, all on your disk.
2. You bring the model. Local models through Ollama or LM Studio, or cloud models through your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini key.
3. It is open. Not "source available" with strings: actually free software, under the GPL, that the community can fork and keep.

So we built it.

What it does today

Let us be honest about where this is: OpenDesign is pre-beta. It is an early developer preview, and it is moving quickly. What already works is the foundation the rest stands on:

• A cross-platform desktop shell built on Tauri, with the Rust-to-frontend bridge everything runs through.
• A provider layer with bring-your-own-key support for Ollama, LM Studio, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenRouter, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, with model roles, cost tracking, and retries.
• Design-system tooling that extracts colors, type, and components from a real codebase so generated work matches what you already have.
• A live, multi-renderer canvas that mounts generated HTML and React in a sandbox, with click-to-select.
• Local persistence: the .opendesign project format, autosave, version snapshots, and crash recovery, all on disk.

End-to-end generation, the refinement loop, code export, and developer handoff over MCP are in progress right now. The full picture (including what is merely planned and what we are still exploring) is on the Roadmap, grouped honestly by status. Nothing there claims to be further along than it is.

Local-first, BYOK, no allowance

The design principle underneath all of it: your work stays on your machine. On first launch, OpenDesign makes zero network requests. Nothing leaves your disk unless you connect a cloud provider yourself, and when you do, the request goes straight from your machine to that provider, under their policy, with your key stored in the OS keychain and every outbound call written to a local audit log.

There is no weekly quota, because there is no meter. If you run local models, you can work entirely offline. You pay your provider directly for what you use, and no one sits in the middle.

Open, and staying that way

OpenDesign is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later. We follow an open-core model, like ComfyUI and AltTab: the open app is the real product and stays free, while the steward (MAECLY) reserves the right to offer a commercial edition on top. We spell out that trade-off plainly on the License and About pages. The free edition is not a demo, it is the product.

Follow along

The project is built by a small team, in the open, and it is better with more hands. Star and watch the repo on GitHub, open issues, or send a pull request. This is the beginning of it. Thanks for being here early.