With over 84,000 GitHub stars since its April 2026 launch, Open Design has emerged as the definitive open-source alternative to Anthropic's Claude Design. Rather than shipping its own language model, Open Design acts as an agent-agnostic design orchestration layer that auto-detects 25+ coding CLI executables on your PATH — including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Qwen, GitHub Copilot CLI, Hermes, and Kimi — or connects to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint via its built-in BYOK proxy at /api/proxy/stream. The platform introduces a file-based protocol where SKILL.md files define composable design workflows and DESIGN.md files establish version-controlled brand systems, currently shipping 31 first-party skills and 72 brand-grade design systems. Output spans web and mobile prototypes, live dashboards, presentation decks, raster images, video, and HyperFrames motion graphics, with export pipelines for HTML, PDF, PPTX, MP4, and ZIP. The daemon architecture uses SQLite for project state and serves a sandboxed iframe preview renderer with vendored React and Babel for JSX artifacts. Deployment options include the native desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, local daemon mode via pnpm tools-dev, a single-container Docker Compose path serving both API and Next.js frontend on port 7456, and Vercel deployment for the web layer. On RepoCloud, deploy Open Design on a dedicated VPS with full root SSH access, persistent storage for your design systems and generated artifacts, and complete control over which AI providers and agent CLIs your instance connects to, all under the Apache-2.0 license.