Alessandro Sillato

A few weeks ago, Anthropic launched Claude Design. If you do not know it yet, here is a quick summary. It is a workspace inside Claude.ai where you describe what you want, and Claude builds a visual version of it. A landing page, a slide deck, an interactive prototype. You can refine it through conversation or inline comments. When you are happy with the result, you can export it to PDF, PPTX, or HTML. You can also send it directly to Claude Code for production.

It is available for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. It runs on Claude Opus 4.7. For now, it is still a research preview.

What makes it interesting is not the technology. It is what it represents. For the first time, the distance between having an idea and showing it to someone is almost zero. You do not need a designer. You do not need to know Figma. You do not need to wait for a mockup. You type, and something appears.

This is a real change in how we work with ideas. Before, the prototype came after the thinking. Now, it is almost part of the thinking itself.

Enter Open CoDesign

Less than a month after the Claude Design announcement, a new project appeared on GitHub. It is called Open CoDesign, and it describes itself as the open source alternative to Claude Design.

The basic idea is similar. You write a prompt, and you get an interactive HTML prototype. But the approach is very different. Open CoDesign is a desktop app built with Electron. It runs on your local machine. You bring your own API key, from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, or even a local Ollama model. Your data never leaves your computer. The code is open source under Apache 2.0.

It supports more than 20 models. It saves version history in a local database. It also has an inline comment system. You click on any element in the preview, and the model rewrites only that part. And it costs nothing beyond what you already pay for your API tokens.

On paper, it solves the main problems of Claude Design. No vendor lock-in. No cloud dependency. No subscription standing between you and the tool.

But let’s be honest about where it is today

I want to be clear about one thing. Open CoDesign is promising, but it is still very early. Right now, the GitHub repository has zero stars and zero public releases. The demo video in the README says “coming soon.” The installers are not signed, so on macOS you need to right-click and open manually. On Windows you have to skip a security warning.

This is not a production tool yet. It is more like a solid foundation with a clear direction. The roadmap includes PPTX export, PDF export, and Figma layer export, but all of these are marked as coming soon.

What already works is more than you might think. You get multi-provider API key support, prompt to HTML prototype, AI-generated sliders for adjustments, inline comment patching, and HTML export. For an alpha project, that is a good start.

If you are a developer who wants to experiment or contribute, it is worth trying. If you are a regular user who wants a polished experience, wait a few months.

The pattern that matters more than the product

Here is what I find more interesting than the tool itself.

Every time Anthropic or OpenAI launches something new, the open source community reacts very quickly. Sometimes within days. We saw it with Claude Artifacts, with ChatGPT Plugins, with Cursor. Someone reads the announcement, understands the core idea, and starts building a version that does not depend on a single company or a subscription.

This is not just excitement from developers. It is a signal. When people rush to copy something, it means the original is solving a real problem. It also means people want that solution without the conditions that come with it. Usually: control, cost, and privacy.

Open CoDesign exists because some people want what Claude Design offers, but without the lock-in. They want to use Gemini today and switch to a local model next month. They want to know exactly what they are spending. They do not want a platform that can change its pricing at any time.

These are fair concerns. I have written about this before when talking about n8n and automation workflows. If a hosted service goes down or changes its terms, you lose access to your tools. The same risk exists here.

What this tells us about the future of conceptual work

The real story here is not about Open CoDesign versus Claude Design. It is about what both of them represent.

We are in a moment where conceptual work is changing. Giving shape to an idea, before it becomes code or a product or a decision, used to take time and specific skills. Now it does not. Tools like these do not just make things faster. They change who can do this kind of work.

A founder can now create something visual without knowing design. A product manager can build a prototype without waiting for a designer. An IT manager can put together a slide deck for a proposal in minutes.

That shift is bigger than any single product. And the fact that the open source community is already building alternatives tells you one thing clearly. This change is not a trend. It is structural. The question is not whether these tools will become part of how we work. The question is who controls the layer you depend on when they do.