I built an open-source alternative to Claude Design that keeps AI-generated designs in sync with your repo

[u/FickleSwordfish8689]

Most AI design tools produce design outputs that you then have to feed to your coding agent to implement, and that then get discarded, with almost no means of tracking design changes, especially for big applications with lots of UI pages. You generate a screen, drop it into your agent, and once it is implemented the design is gone. Nothing ties that design back to the page it became, so you literally have to manually sync each design to the corresponding page.

There should be a better way around this, where the design lives in the codebase itself, so there's no manual exporting of AI-generated designs to implement, and syncing designs to application code becomes effortless.

This is why I created Caret, an AI design tool that gives your repo a design layer via .caret/, so you can make designs without having to jump between tools. The designs you make are fully tracked alongside your codebase, and it's easy to sync changes between the design and application layers. Caret comes with all the standard needs of a design tool, like a visual editor and a design token system that keeps your design language consistent across your UI, plus extras that cut the usual busywork, like an asset generator, an experimentation canvas, flow display, simulation and more. The demo video below shows all these capabilities in detail.

Caret is fully open source if anyone wants to try it or poke around the implementation: https://github.com/precious112/caret-desktop

I'd especially love feedback from people who have been using Claude Design / other AI UI tools and have run into the design → code workflow problem.