Introduction

Potlot is a local design workspace on your desktop. AI agents you already use draw on its canvas, and you can edit the result by hand.

What Potlot is

Potlot is a desktop app for designing with AI agents. You describe what you want, an agent builds it on a canvas, and you refine it yourself or ask for changes. Everything runs on your machine: your files, the app, and the agents.

Potlot does not come with an AI model of its own. It runs the agent CLIs you already have and are signed in to: Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, Antigravity and Pi. If you have none of them, the built-in Potlot Agent can talk to any OpenAI-compatible API with your own key; it is off until you turn it on.

How it works

The app has two parts. The window you see is the editor. Behind it runs a small potlot daemon that holds your open documents, lays them out, and takes screenshots with your installed Chrome or Chromium.

Agents draw through MCP, the Model Context Protocol. The daemon exposes a tool called execute that runs short JavaScript snippets against the document. Each snippet is a transaction: if it fails, the whole change is rolled back. Agents also get get_app_state, get_style and read_skill, which give them the canvas state, style directions and Potlot's design guides.

Because this is plain MCP, you can also connect an agent from your own terminal. potlot mcp attaches to the running app, so Claude Code or Codex in a terminal edits the same document you have open.

Your files

A design is a .ptl file. It is plain JSON, so you can keep it in a project folder and commit it to Git. Images live in a folder next to it named <name>-assets/. New projects are created in their own folder in the documents folder inside ~/.potlot, where Potlot keeps its app data. Files from Potlot 0.1.3 and earlier end in .potlot; they still open, and Potlot moves the ones in its documents folder to the new layout when it updates.

Who it is for

• Developers who already use Claude Code, Codex or a similar agent and want it to produce visual designs, not only code.
• Designers who want to start from a generated draft and then edit it the way they would in a design tool.
• Anyone who wants design work to stay local, with no account and no cloud project storage.

What you can do

• Start a project from a prompt on Home, with a project type such as Landing page, Mobile app, Web app, Slides or Dashboard.
• Attach reference images or a written brief to a prompt.
• Run up to six agents on one prompt, either splitting the work or each designing its own variant side by side.
• Queue follow-ups while an agent works, and steer it when you change your mind.
• Edit by hand: select, drag, resize and rotate layers, use the Frame, Rectangle, Ellipse, Text, Line and Pen tools, and adjust properties in the Inspector.
• Organize work with pages, components and color variables, and add prototype interactions in the Inspector's Prototype mode.
• Export any layer as PNG, JPG, WebP, SVG or PDF, or as an HTML file.

Next steps

1. 1Install Potlot on macOS.
2. 2Connect an agent so Potlot has something to design with.
3. 3Make your first design from the Home screen.
4. 4Learn how to export images and PDFs and export HTML.

Something unclear, missing or broken? Write to feedback@anaknegeri.dev.