open-design/docs/v0.8.0-announcement.md

🔥 Open Design 0.8.0-preview — Design's old world ends here. Help us build the new one.

Status: Now landed on main · 0.8.0 release tag coming up · feedback still wanted Branch: main — everything below tracks main Runs alongside 0.7: installs side-by-side — try it without giving anything up.

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✊ This is not a release. It's a starting gun.

For the last decade, designers have been doing the same thing every morning: open Figma, push pixels, drag rectangles, name layers, sync tokens, ship a spec, watch engineering reinterpret half of it, redo the spec. Five years of this. Ten years for some of you. An entire profession turned into a click farm for a single tool.

We think that era is over. Two things have to be true for it to actually end — and 0.8.0 is the first release where both are real in the same engine:

🥊 Movement 1 — #DeFigma: kill the canvas, keep the craft.

Figma isn't broken. It's just the wrong unit of work in an agent-native world. A design system shouldn't be a file you maintain. A prototype shouldn't be 200 frames you nudge by hand. A slice export shouldn't be a human ritual. The canvas was a workaround for not having a real engine. We have an engine now.

🤖 Movement 2 — Agent-Native Design: the designer becomes the director.

Claude Design, Open Design — agent-driven design is no longer a demo. It's shipping production-grade design systems, world-class UI, decks, prototypes — for people who cannot draw a rectangle. Not in five years. Today, in this preview. The 10×–100× productivity jump people kept promising for AI tooling? It's here, and it's not coming from a chat box bolted onto Figma. It's coming from an engine where the agent is a first-class citizen and the human gives intent, not coordinates.

Every designer, every team, every company — capable of shipping world-class design systems, interfaces, decks, and prototypes. That's the bet. That's what 0.8.0 is built for.

We're young. We're rough. We're 40k stars in and accelerating. We need you to help us push the rest of the way. 🚀

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🧱 Why we rebuilt the core (and why it matters for the movement)

The last two weeks of 0.7 made one thing clear: the research-preview architecture we started with couldn't carry where the community wanted to take it. So instead of patching around it, we rebuilt the foundation — because a movement needs a kernel that other people can build on, not a demo that only its authors can extend.

0.8.0-preview is that rebuild. Three things are different underneath:

• 🧩 Everything is a plugin. The engine stays small and boring. Design systems, slices, prototypes, exports, and every legacy workflow including Figma itself — all of it lives in plugins now. This is how the old world gets ported into the new one: one plugin at a time, by all of us. You write a plugin; you migrate a piece of the industry.
• 🌐 Headless by default. The desktop app is a thin wrapper around the CLI. The same engine runs in Claude Code, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, or straight inside a Lark / Discord / Slack chat. You can drive it with Claude Code. Claude Code can be driven by it. Design stops being a place you go and becomes a capability your agents have.
• ♻️ Plugins create plugins. OD CLI wraps GitHub CLI, so an agent can clone the repo, scaffold a plugin, and open a PR — for you, or for itself. The loop is closed: the engine grows itself, in public, with you in the loop.

The bigger bet behind all of this: an agent-driven design engine the whole industry can build on — open source, vendor-neutral, agent-runtime-neutral. Not another AI design tool. The substrate the next decade of design sits on top of.

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🛠️ How to try it (5 minutes, side-by-side with your 0.7)

Option A — Pre-built installer (recommended)

Latest preview build: 0.8.0-preview.2

• 🍎 macOS (Apple Silicon): open-design-0.8.0-preview.2-mac-arm64.dmg
• 🍎 macOS (Intel): open-design-0.8.0-preview.2-mac-x64.dmg
• 🪟 Windows: open-design-0.8.0-preview.2-win-x64-setup.exe
• 🐧 Linux: coming soon

Option B — Build from source

git clone https://github.com/nexu-io/open-design.git
cd open-design
pnpm install
pnpm tools-dev

0.7 stable and 0.8 preview don't share runtime data — keep both around, switch as you go.

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🙏 We need you. Specifically you. Three ways to enlist.

This is the part that matters. A movement doesn't ship from one team's laptops; it ships from the people who showed up early and built the missing pieces.

1. 🐛 Break it. Loudly.

Anything counts — crashes, "this feels off", "I wish I could…", confusing copy, slow loads. Small reports are the most useful. Don't sit on a half-formed thought; we want it.

→ Open a 0.8.0 preview feedback issue — bugs, suggestions, first impressions, all welcome. The team watches all open issues.

For open-ended thoughts that aren't really a bug — reply on this thread. Every reply is read.

2. 🧩 Write a plugin. Port a piece of the old world.

This is the highest-leverage thing you can do for the movement. The engine is small on purpose — because the plugin surface is where the industry gets ported in. If your team has a Figma workflow, a token sync, an export pipeline, a brand kit, a deck template, a prototype recipe — wrap it as an OD plugin and that workflow becomes agent-native overnight. For your team, and for everyone else.

We will personally help you ship your first plugin. Open an issue titled Plugin idea: <thing> or ping us on Discord.

If you want to send a fix instead, open a PR against main as usual — 0.8.0 work now lives there. See what's open.

3. 📣 Tell one person.

One designer who's tired of pushing pixels. One PM who's tired of waiting on specs. One engineer who's tired of rebuilding the same component for the fifth time. Send them this thread. The movement scales at the speed of word-of-mouth.

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📦 What's in 0.8.0, and what's not

✅ In the preview today: the plugin engine, the official atomic plugins (Todo, direction-pick, question, Figma export, …), the bundled scene plugins (design-system templates, slice, prototype), and the official Plugin Registry source.

🚧 Not in 0.8.0 yet: we're still finalizing the cut line — the full list lands as an update to this thread shortly.

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🎯 A few things we'd genuinely like your read on

We can guess where 0.8 is solid. These are the parts we can't:

1. The plugin framing. Does "everything is a plugin" feel right when you actually use it? Anywhere you wanted to extend something and the seam felt wrong?
2. Headless. If you've poked at it via CLI, Claude Code, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, or a Lark/Discord agent — how did that feel? Where did the magic break?
3. The 0.7 → 0.8 jump. Anything you relied on in 0.7 that's gone, moved, or behaves differently?
4. Authoring a plugin. Did the agent-guided "create a plugin" flow work end-to-end for you, or fall over somewhere?

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💬 Discord — the war room

Want rapid back-and-forth with the team and a heads-up on every new build?

→ Join the Open Design preview Discord

This thread stays the primary record. Discord is where the live work happens.

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The old world of design is not going to migrate itself. We're writing the engine; you're writing the plugins; together we're porting an entire industry into agent-native ground. Hit Subscribe — the next update is coming fast. 🌅

See you in the PRs. 🫡