Toolcraft: An Open-Source Starter Kit for Building AI-Powered Design Apps

Toolcraft: An Open-Source Starter Kit for Building AI-Powered Design Apps

I built Toolcraft as an open-source starter kit and UI library to help developers create custom design apps with AI. Instead of just providing components, it offers a full application architecture including a working canvas, toolbar, layer system, and timeline. This setup works seamlessly with Codex, Claude, Cursor, or any other AI agent, allowing you to design the outcome rather than just the workspace.

Design the outcome. Not the workspace.
  1. rtpg

    https://pixelpoint.io/blog/how-to-craft-personal-design-tool...

    the blog post announcing this

    > If you need another graphic like that in another place, doing it manually is simply not worth the time. Another problem is experimentation. When you are trying to find the final look, you need to test a lot of small ideas: density, direction, color, spacing, gradients, randomness, shape. The faster you can change these things, the better the final result will be.

    >

    > Doing all of this manually would be a massive waste of time, so building your own procedural art tool for this kind of effect is a perfect solution. The Polar Signals example also works well for the UX argument. A custom tool does not just improve your speed. It gives you an interface that is simply better for this exact task.

    feels like the design industry has forgotten about things like Processing. Unfortunate!

  2. plastic041

    All examples run terribly, like 20fps on m4 pro. Also, examples:

    - Liquid metal. I don't understand what this is but this is definately _not_ how 'liquid metal' would look like. Also stickers glitches on edge.

    - watercolor. Looks like its blending uses RGB?

    - ASCII. not even ASCII. Also why does this run terribly? It's just a simple 3d model with a shader, it should run 1000+fps.

    - Bricks. This looks fine. not impressive though.

    - Shaders. Refraction shader.

    I don't trust someone who says their tool can generate ASCII art renderer without knowing what even ASCII is.

  3. walrus01

    Toolcraft: https://www.toolcraft.com/

    One of the better medium volume CNC shops around.

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2026-07-28