Show HN: CSS Studio. Design by hand, code by agent (cssstudio.ai)
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.
54 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 63.0 ms ] threadNow 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.
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.
Of course you can charge whatever you like, but I’m curious as to the reasoning behind those specific numbers.
- 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
Sure AI can do styling though.
If I understand correctly, is this not as useful for frameworkless html/css/js development? Since when you make edits using browser-built-in-devtools it can and does modify the actual css files (in-memory, of course) which you can use to copy-replace with entirely (assuming no build/bundling step aswell).
If so and this allows you to use any framework and still have that kind of workflow, that's fantastic. Half the reason I don't like using frameworks is because I lose the built-in WYSIWYG editor functionality. Guess I'd still lose the usefulness of the built-in js debugger, tho :(
I didn't see anything like that in the video you posted on the homepage. Personally I found the video VERY confusing on what exactly the benefit of the product is and actually how to use it. The music also was annoying and made it hard to focus on the actual video.
You might want to redo it and concentrate on explaining exactly what the benefits of your product are over the 50+ other products just like this one.
LLMs already carry (rightfully, I might add) a “laziness” aspect to them. You’re doing yourself and your work a major disservice by making this website not only generic as hell, but inconsistent and downright broken on mobile as well.
I would be surprised if this takes off as site builders are already an incredibly crowded space.