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Show HN: CSS Studio. Design by hand, code by agent

https://cssstudio.ai
35•SirHound•1h ago
Hi HN! I've just released CSS Studio, a design tool that lives on your site, runs on your browser, sends updates to your existing AI agent, which edits any codebase. You can actually play around with the latest version directly on the site.

Technically, the way this works is you view your site in dev mode and start editing it. In your agent, you can run /studio which then polls (or uses Claude Channels) an MCP server. Changes are streamed as JSON via the MCP, along with some viewport and URL information, and the skill has some instructions on how best to implement them.

It contains a lot of the tools you'd expect from a visual editing tool, like text editing, styles and an animation timeline editor.

Comments

ramon156•1h ago
I'll be the boogeyman, how does this compare to Figma's AI Design tool? I've had an easy experience with it, although it's just a GPT wrapper.
SirHound•59m ago
With Figma Make, that's essentially doing the same thing as your agent, just with a visual sandbox. i.e building something from scratch.

CSS Studio leverages your existing agent - so it assumes you've already done this part. Where this comes in is when you want to design not just using chat (although it does also support chat). Drawing new elements, visual style controls, inline content editing, animation timeline editor and preview. Then once you're done you can send those changes to your agent with a click (or turn on auto-apply)

It does have some similarities with Figma's Code Layers in that you can draw a new element on the page, click chat, and tell the agent to generate x inside.

steve-atx-7600•13m ago
I get a lot out of giving Claude screenshots of a baseline of what I want and describing how my goal design differs from it. Output is a single page apps where that I can use for high fidelity prototypes. Then, I have Claude implement the final version of this iteration into our product single page app repo (following existing patterns we’ve established for long term maintenance). For more throwaway code (maintenance not important, mostly static content), our marketing team is able to do this to create content that they put into webflow.
evancaine•1h ago
Congrats on the launch.

Now put a giant, 30 second video of the product being used, directly below "Design by hand.Code by agent."

No one is clicking Get Started or Buy Now until they know what the product is, and a 30 second video is 100x better than any amount of text.

SirHound•58m ago
I did have a video on for launch but removed it when I added CSS Studio itself to the page (check top right). Perhaps it can make a return though!
bossyTeacher•55m ago
You need a video. Time is money
SirHound•26m ago
It's up!
serial_dev•48m ago
I’m on mobile, I’d much rather see some visual demo, ideally video, explaining your product in 60 seconds or less than try to tap around in the live demo.
SirHound•26m ago
It's a great point, I added the video back
sassymuffinz•39m ago
I'll be honest I didn't notice it sitting up there in the top right until I saw this message, it's in that area I ignore where people usually put social logos etc.

Anyway - question on the software itself, how would CSS changes feed through to the code? Inline CSS, utility classes if you're using a framework? Does it support using something like Vite for compiling?

SirHound•19m ago
All the technical decisions are yours. If you defined a padding (for instance) in a stylesheet, this is where updates will be applied. Likewise if it was on a style attr or elsewhere.
gianthard•31m ago
The video better be visible on mobile. I read HN on phone.
SirHound•26m ago
It's a fair point - deployed
tyleo•1h ago
The landing page feels tacky to me. It has a similar style to what I’ve seen LLMs churn out across the internet. Unclear if it’s actually generated or not but it’s at least in that style.

For a design product, I’d expect it to have more personality.

I’d recommend reving the landing by hand. The sense I get is that this tool can make a site that looks like everyone else’s. It would be neat to see something unique.

SirHound•55m ago
I suspect its the color scheme? I wanted something to contrast with but pair with https://motion.dev but I know AIs pump out a lot of purple. I'm mostly a developer though so my design skills are a little rusty still!
latexr•33m ago
64.23€ and 256.92€ are strange numbers. The latter looks like bad math, since the text suggests it’s 51*5, which would be 255.

Of course you can charge whatever you like, but I’m curious as to the reasoning behind those specific numbers.

hapidjus•29m ago
If you go to the order page its 79€ with VAT. Not sure why its shown sans VAT on the page. Also the price is 99$ on page load but updates fast.
SirHound•22m ago
Was displaying without tax - fixed now
latexr•20m ago
The team pricing still calculates wrongly (63*5 is 315, not 316).
SirHound•15m ago
Just put out a fix for this, thanks
rafaelmn•30m ago
Does this work with CSS in JS stuff and CSS frameworks - like if I was using Chakra would this be able to edit the site elements and have the agent reverse map to where the style attributes need to go ?
SirHound•25m ago
Yes - if your agent can edit your codebase it will put the changes in the right place.
dmje•29m ago
I'm definitely the audience for this - and +1 to the "show video of it in action" comments...
SirHound•25m ago
Video added
mpeg•15m ago
Motion is an excellent library so I gave this a go on a prod site. Some feedback

- I LOVE the concept, no clunky SaaS, you add the package and start it on your dev server and it just works. It seamlessly did with my vite based build.

- Needs a diff view which tells me what the agent is going to change when I publish my changes, right now it's a bit scary to use without it (not sure if it does once you try to publish changes, I didn't get that far in the process)

- I don't see the point of the "draw" feature. Maybe it's because I envision this kind of tool being used so that non-technical members of the team can make small design changes without dev support, and not as a way to design from scratch, but maybe you have a use-case for it.

- Integration with tailwindcss would be a killer feature, this particular project uses tailwind so all the styles in the style view show as the default ones but of course they're being applied via classes. You could detect tailwind classes and either show them separately or resolve them and show what they do in the styles view, then on publish you'd tell the agent to edit using tailwind classes

I agree with what others have said, a video or even better a live demo would be great. A demo would be extra work but would be super cool, as a stopgap you could have a stackblitz demo maybe.

The client-side injected js -> mcp flow is brilliant though. I might have to steal that idea for some projects I'm working in, I can imagine a lot of scenarios where it would make a great interface

SirHound•11m ago
Thanks for your feedback!

I just pushed a video to the homepage, there was already a live demo though, it was actually quite simple to implement (mostly gate a few things). There was a bit of a fear that agent somewhere out there would still be listening though...

I think a diff is an excellent idea. Perhaps with the ability to remove specific changes and switch before/after.

In terms of Tailwind, I'm thinking about a token/strict mode which would detect Tailwind classes and CSS variables. It wouldn't expose these in the sense you had to apply each one manually, but if you were for instance changing padding, it would snap between all your pre-defined tokens.

For the draw feature I think I'm just heavily Framer-pilled and it lets you pre-determine a rough width and height within a stack. But perhaps there's space for a click-to-add also with minimum dimensions.

mpeg•9m ago
Sorry I'm blind! I completely missed the live demo. I think because it's on the top right corner I instinctively ignored it.

Maybe could have a "Try live" button that sort of nudges you to it (could open the sidebar with the page structure or something to make it obvious you're in "edit mode") if other people struggle to find it

Re. diff view, yes, I think it's the kind of thing that would give reassurance to users that they can play around with it without breaking anything, otherwise I feel I'd be a bit scared of accidentally touching something that shouldn't be changed (especially as you might experiment a bit before you land on the right style to change)

megaman821•13m ago
I was looking at this yesterday and wondering if it would play nice with design systems. AI loves making localized changes and when playing around with spacing I tend to just bump up and down values until they look close, so when this sends over the changeset, what are the chances the spacing token is going to be used rather than some exact pixel value?
SirHound•8m ago
You can apply the token directly but of course this isn't as nice as freeform editing. I suspect the pixel value would be used because the intention probably isn't to change the root variable (as there's an explicit option for that). I'm thinking of making a token mode where we limit you to the values of available CSS variables or Tailwind classes (perhaps unless you hold shift or something)
bigblind•5m ago
This looks interesting! I understand not wanting to put out a narrated tour as the video, but being visually impaired, i find video demos without narration, that constantly move around/focus on different things hard to follow. It still might be worth putting a short screencast with you actually walkign through usijng the product and narrating it.
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