Project
aidesign
A local-only tool for designing websites by chatting with Claude. It generates live-previewed HTML and CSS mockups on your own machine, with free local image generation, and nothing leaves the box.
What it is
aidesign is a small tool I built for myself. You open it in a browser, talk to Claude in a chat, and it writes plain HTML, CSS, and JS mockups into per-project folders on disk. Each design previews in a real browser tab that reloads the moment Claude saves a change. Nothing leaves the machine except the Claude CLI’s own API calls.
The loop is short. You describe what you want, Claude generates the files, the preview reloads, and you refine by chatting or by drawing on the preview and dropping it back into the chat. It also generates real imagery locally with Stable Diffusion, so mockups arrive with photos instead of grey boxes.
Examples
One prompt, three directions
I gave it one brief and let it run: “create 3 websites for a kids playground where people can buy tickets for the playground.” It returned three that share their subject and nothing else. Click one to open it full-screen.
Updates
Build log
Open-source release
Published to GitHub under the MIT license, with a one-command
./bin/setupand an opt-in image service.Local image generation
Stable Diffusion 1.5 running natively on Apple Silicon, self-hosted and free, as an opt-in sidecar the design agent calls on its own.
Annotate the preview
Drop reference images into chat, and draw on a live preview to point at the exact thing to change.
Live preview and canvas
Designs preview in real browser tabs that reload on save, with a project canvas of live thumbnails and drag-drop uploads.
Chat plumbing
The Claude CLI runs as a per-project subprocess, streaming over SSE, with multi-chat history and per-chat cost tracking in USD.
Foundations
Repo layout, the dev script, and the FastAPI plus Svelte skeleton, bound to localhost only.