Design directly in the codebase
Onlook, founded by designer Daniel Farrell and ex-Amazon/ServiceNow engineer Kiet Ho, went through Y Combinator's W25 batch with a bold pitch: "Cursor for designers." Instead of designing mockups in Figma and handing them off, designers open their team's actual React codebase in Onlook and manipulate it visually — drag, drop, rearrange, restyle — while the tool writes the corresponding code in real time.
How it works
Onlook renders the app on an infinite canvas built from the components the team already maintains. Every visual change maps to a real code change, so the code remains the single source of truth and nothing gets lost in translation between design and engineering. An AI chat assists with generating layouts, styling with Tailwind, and iterating on ideas, and finished work can be published to custom domains or pushed to GitHub. The project is fully open source and hit #1 trending on GitHub, now with over 25,000 stars — one of the most-watched design-tool repos ever.
Model and stage
The self-hosted version is free and open source; a hosted cloud version for teams is offered with custom pricing. Onlook is early-stage, backed by Y Combinator, and represents the emerging category of AI-native visual development where design happens in production code rather than mockups.