baoyu-design

Run Claude Design on your own local agent — Cursor, Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or any file‑capable coding agent.

English · 简体中文 · Changelog

baoyu-design packages Claude Design — the design engine behind claude.ai/design — as a portable Agent Skill. Drop it into a local agent and you get most of what the website does, right inside your editor: polished UI mockups, interactive prototypes, wireframes, landing pages, dashboards, mobile apps, and slide decks — all produced as self‑contained HTML.

No website, no separate subscription, no upload step. The agent already on your machine does the work, and every artifact stays in your repo.

---

Screenshots

The same Reader Mac App prompt was used in Cursor, Codex, Claude, and Claude Design.

| Cursor | Codex | Claude | Claude Design | |---|---|---|---| | <img src="assets/screenshots/cursor-reader-mac-app.webp" alt="Cursor running baoyu-design" width="240"> | <img src="assets/screenshots/codex-reader-mac-app.webp" alt="Codex running baoyu-design" width="240"> | <img src="assets/screenshots/claude-reader-mac-app.webp" alt="Claude running baoyu-design" width="240"> | <img src="assets/screenshots/claude-design-reader-mac-app.webp" alt="Claude Design running the same Reader Mac App prompt" width="240"> |

<details> <summary>Prompt used for all screenshots</summary>

Build a Reader Mac app that helps me read and save articles better. All data is stored locally.

## Information collection

1. Manual adding
Support manually adding different types of information:
- URL: enter a URL and automatically fetch content and images
- Attachments: upload PDFs, videos, and images
- Markdown editing: like publishing a blog post, enter the title, body, and cover image
- Other

2. Automatic subscriptions
- RSS feeds
- Social media accounts: X, Weibo, YouTube
- Other

## Editing and organization

1. Tags
Every item can have tags.

2. Categories and folders
Create tree-structured folders and place content in different categories.

3. Favorites
Users can click to favorite an item.

4. Editing
Every item can be edited with a built-in Markdown editor.

## AI assistance

1. Automatic translation
Support translation across different languages.

2. Summaries and abstracts
Generate summaries for captured content.

3. Derivative creation
Create new work based on one or more pieces of content.

4. Integrated AI Chat
Use AI Chat to call AI Agents that help process content.

</details>

---

Why run it locally

• Free yourself from the website. You get the vast majority of claude.ai/design's capabilities without ever leaving your editor — same methodology, same craft standards, same output format.
• Best with Opus 4.8. The skill is a long, demanding design brief; the stronger the model, the better the result. Pair it with Claude Opus 4.8 for the best output, and it still works well on other capable models.
• Iterate by pointing, not describing. Because the deliverable is plain HTML served on localhost, you can lean on your agent's built‑in browser preview and element‑annotation tools (Cursor Browser / DevTools, Claude Preview, or Codex Browser). Point at a button in the live preview, say what you want changed, and the agent edits the underlying source — a tight, visual second‑pass editing loop that's hard to get on a website.
• Everything is yours. Output lands in designs/<project>/ as self‑contained HTML you can version, fork, export, or ship.

---

What it can make

The skill drives a full design process — clarifying questions → gathering design context → producing one or more HTML deliverables → previewing and verifying. It ships a deep bench of built‑in skills and a set of ready‑made component scaffolds.

| Area | Built‑in skills | |---|---| | Core design | Hi‑fi design · Interactive prototype · Wireframe · Frontend aesthetic direction | | Decks | Make a deck · Speaker notes | | Mobile & motion | Mobile prototype · Animated video · Sound effects | | Web & campaigns | Website & landing page · Social media content · HTML email · Flier · Trifold brochure | | Data & research | Web research · Data science · Data visualization · Maps & geography · Experiment workflow | | Documents, 3D & illustration | Make a doc · 3D object · Watercolor illustration | | Design systems | Create design system · Use design system · Design system preview · Design Components (.dc.html) · Make tweakable | | Import sources | Figma .fig (offline decode) · GitHub repo · Existing HTML/CSS | | Export & handoff | Standalone HTML · PDF · PPTX (editable) · PPTX (screenshots) · Video (MP4) · Send to Figma · Send to Canva · Handoff to Claude Code | | AI assets & integration | Gemini image generation · Call Claude from prototypes · Read PDF |

Starter components (in starter-components/) save the agent from hand‑rolling the basics: device, browser, and social-media shells; a pan‑zoom design canvas; slide, animation, chart, document, file, and 3D stages; a tweaks panel; a fillable image slot; and a watercolor painting runtime that replays a painting stroke by stroke.

---

How it works

The skill is plain Markdown plus a few JSX/JS scaffolds — no build step, no runtime.

skills/baoyu-design/
├── SKILL.md              # Entry point — orchestrates the whole flow
├── system-prompt.md      # The design methodology & craft standards (source of truth)
├── references/
│   ├── claude.md         # Tool map for Claude Code
│   ├── cursor.md         # Tool map for Cursor
│   └── codex.md          # Tool map for Codex Agent
├── built-in-skills/      # Specialized prompts (decks, mobile, import, export, …)
└── starter-components/   # Device/social shells, deck, chart, document, 3D, animation, …

When you ask for a design, the agent reads SKILL.md, loads the core methodology from system-prompt.md, detects whether it's running in Cursor, Claude Code, Codex Agent, or a generic file‑capable harness, and reads the matching reference doc when one exists. It then pulls in only the built‑in skill(s) the task needs. The split keeps craft rules harness‑independent while each environment resolves its own tools for asking questions, previewing, screenshotting, and verifying.

---

Quick start

Prerequisites

• A local agent — Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or any of the 70+ agents the installer supports (Cline, Roo Code, GitHub Copilot…). Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex have first‑class tool references inside the skill.
• Claude Opus 4.8 selected as the model, for best results.
• Node.js (to run the npx installer below). Python 3 is also handy for the local preview server.

Install

Recommended — the skills CLI. npx skills (from Vercel Labs) reads this repo, finds skills/baoyu-design/, and drops it into the right folder for whatever agent it detects:

# Install into the current project (auto‑detects your agent)
npx skills add JimLiu/baoyu-design

# …or install globally, for every project
npx skills add JimLiu/baoyu-design -g

# Target a specific agent explicitly
npx skills add JimLiu/baoyu-design --agent claude-code
npx skills add JimLiu/baoyu-design --agent cursor
npx skills add JimLiu/baoyu-design --agent codex

# Just list what's in the repo first
npx skills add JimLiu/baoyu-design --list

It installs to .claude/skills/ for Claude Code and .agents/skills/ for Cursor/Codex-style agents (add -g for the ~/‑level user install).

Update

If you installed baoyu-design with the skills CLI, update it from the terminal:

# Update and let the CLI prompt for the install scope
npx skills update baoyu-design

# Update the project-level install
npx skills update baoyu-design -p -y

# Update the global install
npx skills update baoyu-design -g -y

upgrade is also supported as an alias:

npx skills upgrade baoyu-design

You can also run npx skills update to update all installed skills. After updating, restart Claude Code (or start a new agent session) so the refreshed skill files are loaded.

Alternative — hand the repo URL to your agent. Don't want to install anything? Paste the URL into chat and let the agent fetch the skill itself:

Read https://github.com/JimLiu/baoyu-design and follow its skills/baoyu-design/SKILL.md to design a settings screen for a meditation app.

The agent clones or fetches the repo, loads SKILL.md, and proceeds — perfect for a one‑off.

Use it

Once the skill is installed (or fetched), just describe a design task in plain language — it auto‑activates from its description:

Design 3 hi‑fi variations of a settings screen for a meditation app.

In Claude Code you can also trigger it explicitly with /baoyu-design; in Codex, mention $baoyu-design when skills are available. The agent asks a few clarifying questions, builds the HTML under designs/, and previews it over localhost. Point at any element in the live preview and say what to change — the agent edits the underlying source for a fast, visual second pass.

Preview server

Deliverables are previewed over HTTP (multi‑file prototypes won't load from file://). The agent normally starts this for you; to run it by hand:

python3 -m http.server 4311 --directory designs
# then open http://localhost:4311/<project>/<file>.html

---

Design systems

Beyond one‑off mockups, the skill can hold a whole project to a design system — a versioned bundle of a brand's tokens, fonts, components, and full UI kits. Systems live next to your projects under designs/: author one with the Create design system built‑in skill, drop in a pre‑built one, or import one from a Figma .fig file (see the next section). Once a system exists, two flows let any project consume it.

Import an existing design system

When you start a design, the agent asks where to save it and which design system(s) to use — it discovers every system under designs/ and lists them, so you can pick none (free design), one, or several. Name one up front and it skips the menu:

Design a settings screen using the Fluent 2 design system.

For each system you choose, the agent syncs a self‑contained, version‑pinned copy into your project at _ds/<slug>/, wires its CSS and component bundle into the page, and records the binding in the project's _d_meta.json. That local copy is what keeps the project portable and reproducible — nothing reaches outside the folder, and re‑running the import is how you pull updates later. Choose several systems and one becomes primary — it owns the overall look and wins any token collision, while the others lend specific components.

Use an imported design system

Once a system is bound it acts as a binding visual contract, not a loose suggestion: every screen is built from the system's real tokens, type, spacing, and components, and the agent won't invent off‑system colors or styles. If the system ships starting points — ready‑made screens or components — you can seed a new design from one instead of starting blank.

The binding travels with the project. Reopen it later and the agent reads _d_meta.json, reloads the system, and keeps designing in‑style — no need to re‑pick. From there you can refresh a system to pull updates, add another, swap which one is primary, or remove one entirely.

---

Import design source