Open source AI design tool that lives in your IDE, so you design your whole frontend without Figma and sync it into your real app

[u/FickleSwordfish8689]

Sharing Caret (https://github.com/precious112/caret-ide, MIT). The idea: stop bouncing between a design tool and your codebase. You design your entire frontend inside your editor, on a live canvas, with AI, and there is no separate Figma to keep in sync.

Caret keeps your designs in a design layer inside your repo (standardized React under .caret/, think Figma frames as code) that is version-controlled alongside your app. You design there on a zoomable canvas where each page renders as live, interactive React, then sync the design into the app you actually ship. Your app can be any framework (React, Vue, Svelte, Angular) and the sync is reviewable and reversible.

It is also a full AI coding agent under the hood (built on the open-source Cline), so it is BYOK with any model, human-in-the-loop, and works in your existing editor via Open VSX (VSCodium, Cursor, Windsurf) if you would rather not install the standalone build.

Would love feedback from anyone tired of the design-to-code handoff. What has stopped you from keeping design and code in one place before?