Glossary
Interface terms are kept as they appear on screen.
Core concepts
Adapter — a thin shim translating one agent's native message format into OpenDesign's skill protocol. Adding an agent is a single file.
Agent — the thing that actually does the work. OpenDesign generates nothing itself; it hands the task to whichever agent you connect.
Anti-slop — a set of rules separating "shipped by someone who has built product" from "default LLM output". Some are auto-enforced by lint-artifact; the rest are guidance, marked as such.
Artifact — what gets generated, landing in your project directory. A real file, not a record in a vendor database.
BYOK — bring your own key. Credentials and spend stay on your side, and API calls go from your machine straight to the provider.
Container soup — the generic output a model produces without context: a hero, three cards, a CTA. The discovery form exists to prevent it.
Craft — 12 brand-agnostic rendering principles covering accessibility, motion, states, and typography — the "what counts as acceptable" layer. Skills declare which ones they need in frontmatter.
daemon — the local background service at the heart of OpenDesign. pnpm tools-dev starts it; the od command talks to it directly.
DESIGN.md — a design system file: a visual language written as machine-readable contract — palette, type, spacing, components, motion, voice.
Discovery form — the questionnaire before generation, produced from your prompt, asking about exactly the gaps you left.
HyperFrames — the collaborating project behind the video line, driving product prototype demos and data-visualisation animation with code.
lint-artifact — the checker inside the daemon. Failing an enforced rule is a regression, not a style preference.
od — the CLI entry point. Drives the daemon with no UI, which suits CI and scripting.
Self-critique gate — the scoring pass an artifact goes through before you see it.
SKILL.md — a skill file: how one kind of work gets done — when it applies, what to establish first, the standard structure, hard constraints, acceptance criteria.
State coverage — a craft rule requiring every interactive surface to render empty, loading, error, and extreme states. The project calls shipping only the populated state the single most reliable AI-design failure.
tools-dev — the lifecycle entry point for the source build. Start, status, and stop all go through it.
In the interface
Comment — pins feedback to a specific element.
Critique — the five-dimension self-review: philosophy, visual hierarchy, detail, functionality, innovation, each 0–10.
Dashboard — generates a charted control surface.
Deck Mode / Slideshow — generates an editable HTML deck. The official PPT tutorial uses the first name; the button says the second.
Design System — reverse-extracts a DESIGN.md from a screenshot or a Figma export.
Edit — changes text or style properties directly, without regenerating.
Image Mode / Image — generates bitmaps: posters, covers, icons, reference images.
Mark — circles a visual region to describe a problem. Best for position and layout.
Prototype — generates a single-file HTML interface.
The plugin library
Templates — runnable starting points, each with an example.html. 292 of them.
Skills — pure SKILL.md instruction. 23.
Systems — brand-grade DESIGN.md files. 152.
Together, 479+ entries, collectively "plugins".
The ecosystem
Apache-2.0 — the licence. Fork it, change it, use it commercially.
Claude Design — Anthropic's hosted design product. OpenDesign positions itself as the open-source, local-first alternative.
nexu-io/open-design — the GitHub repository.
Powerformer, Inc. — the maintainer.
On the name
OpenDesign, Open Design, open-design, opendesign, Open Design AI, OD — all the same project. The repo slug is open-design, the product and READMEs write it OpenDesign, and the canonical address is open-design.ai.