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?
Too bad because once I saw it and tried it out, that's when I thought the experience feels slick and polished.
I think you shoud consider either having an onboarding that highlights it or put a giant arrow on your landing page background, between the video and the bar, with a "Try it on this page"
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.
I think it would be preferable if the agent figured out the right place to do this.
When I debug CSS or toy with styling, I will often edit the element styles directly but naturally I would like them to be applied within classes the element has, or maybe add a new utility. Never would I put styles on the element.
I suppose that in the same fashion, if your project uses tailwind or something, you will edit styles manually but when you get it right you want them to be added as “whatever the code uses”
Sorry, I mean to say the agent does figure out the right place, based on your technical decisions. So if you want to use classes it isn't going to start adding style attributes. The skill contains instructions about following the existing setup within the codebase.
So if I’m using Tailwibd let’s say, and then I adjust the padding on an element does it update the HTML (or does the agent update my html) with an alternative padding class like p-4 or p-[11px] or something if nothing matches?
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.
“Don’t show them the keys of the piano, play the moonlight sonata. “
The key to a good demo is not listing or even showing the features, it’s showing them what they can accomplish with it. You need to inspire your prospects.
bro listen to the guy above you. You need the lowest friction way to help users visualize what this is. By low friction I mean the exact way tik tok gets people to watch thousands of videos for hours. Only one click and zero brain power.
I wanted to buy this. I tried the demo, but then I hit a wall of no agent connected and gave up and came here looking for reviews on whether this is good or shit.
I never considered that people want to watch a video in this day and age when they can try the real thing.
Perhaps I've fallen into that trap with the product [1] I'm building. I have a "Live Demo" button on the landing page and thought that would be enough? I'm going to reconsider...
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.
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
I'm confused about what the AI is doing, since it seems like a WSYWIG site editor. The AI is just to apply the changes? Why not have the WSYWIG just apply it directly if that is how you build the site?
The video was really good, and the UI looks fun too.
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 :(
A bunch of comments are complaining about how it's crazy that this is $99 or that they'll vibe code a free version this weekened. I've tried to make a similar tool for myself that let's me change CSS values live without talking to the agent and it made me appreciate the hundreds of invisible details that figma, framer, paper, etc. get right when building a visual canvas editor. I spent 6 hours going back and forth with claude just to get the editor to feel somewhat usable for editing existing front end work.
I work in an agency that makes flashy marketing sites. My biggest concern with tools like this is always how it works responsively across viewports. I can make a change in dev tools and it can translate to my code, but it might not work at all when I drag the viewport up and down. Can you comment on how this product works on that problem?
I'll give my honest take, I think what you've done is taken dev-tools and given it a wrapper that most designers (including myself would love) I find myself in dev tools alot during QA refining the design, since rendering is never exact. And you've added MCP server integration which is great. But....
First 99$? that's steep my full seat of Figma is 160.0$, so I don't see the value. I do see the value in convienience so you may want to rethink the pricing structure. Second. It's a design tool, not SASS software, the website should speak to designers like me, not look like supabase. Great job, I wish you luck...ken. Kylex.io
you should definitely highlight the edit button on the right corner. until I've noticed it, I was quite skeptical. after playing around - I'm immediately sold (i'm on desktop btw)
congrats on launch, nice product. Hope this would be a thing.
"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."
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.
Unlike other comments, for me the experience on the product marketing worked well and straight forward.
After reading the title and landing on your homepage, I had the feeling that this is yet another product claiming WYSIWYG like editor for the web claims on making CSS editing easier. And yes the product achieves same as I thought.
Video confirmed it, and homepage live demo confirmed it again.
Surprisingly the claim feels true, this time. It feels natural and UX feels great.
I like this concept and it definitely fits current AI era. There’s still a lot of room for humans to clean up the kind of sloppy, AI-ish design that tools tend to spit out today. I’m sure that will keep improving, but for now you still need a human hand on it.
I get that this tool is aimed at designers, but depending on how the features evolve I think it could pull in a lot more indie devs and similar folks too.
Look, if you’re making a design tool, the absolute very least that you can do to show that you know what makes a design tool good is design a good website for it.
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 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?
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.
Any website that isn't some landing page or basic blog is going to need human intervention in the code (craftsmanship, essentially). And any website that's a landing page or basic blog already has a million tools for GUI design.
I would be surprised if this takes off as site builders are already an incredibly crowded space.
When I apply display:none, how would I get back the element without using the browser console? If I change things from the console, does your tool watch the changes via mutation observer or does it only know about the changes from the visual tool itself?
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 ?
wysiwyg and wordpress gui editors: set width/height of an element by pixels.
Me: no thank you, i need col-sm-12 and col-md-6 like in bootstrap... actually i use bootstrap 90% of my projects
Running three agents(gpt, gemini, claude) in production for a different domain — curious which model handles the /studio skill best in your experience?
Hey OP I had this same idea a few years ago, but my implementation was dogshit! Check out the browser extension I made [0] - note it doesn’t work anymore, it worked with the first released Google Gemini Flash model ;)
Check out my browser extension, it may give you some more ideas?? My extension is from 2024
But basically it would let you screenshot a portion of your dev site, and auto get feedback from an LLM to improve the visuals.
My original idea was to have it modify your source code, but I lost interest in the project lol
107 comments
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.
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?
Too bad because once I saw it and tried it out, that's when I thought the experience feels slick and polished.
I think you shoud consider either having an onboarding that highlights it or put a giant arrow on your landing page background, between the video and the bar, with a "Try it on this page"
When I debug CSS or toy with styling, I will often edit the element styles directly but naturally I would like them to be applied within classes the element has, or maybe add a new utility. Never would I put styles on the element.
I suppose that in the same fashion, if your project uses tailwind or something, you will edit styles manually but when you get it right you want them to be added as “whatever the code uses”
The key to a good demo is not listing or even showing the features, it’s showing them what they can accomplish with it. You need to inspire your prospects.
I wanted to buy this. I tried the demo, but then I hit a wall of no agent connected and gave up and came here looking for reviews on whether this is good or shit.
I never considered that people want to watch a video in this day and age when they can try the real thing.
Perhaps I've fallen into that trap with the product [1] I'm building. I have a "Live Demo" button on the landing page and thought that would be enough? I'm going to reconsider...
1. https://dbpro.app
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.
- 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
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 :(
congrats on launch, nice product. Hope this would be a thing.
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.
I get that this tool is aimed at designers, but depending on how the features evolve I think it could pull in a lot more indie devs and similar folks too.
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.
Of course you can charge whatever you like, but I’m curious as to the reasoning behind those specific numbers.
Sure AI can do styling though.
Check out my browser extension, it may give you some more ideas?? My extension is from 2024
But basically it would let you screenshot a portion of your dev site, and auto get feedback from an LLM to improve the visuals.
My original idea was to have it modify your source code, but I lost interest in the project lol
Good luck with launch
[0] - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/design-copilot/hgal...
I'm not so sure why it needs an LLM in-between the source files and the editor though...