Tom Huang, Open Design: stars are not revenue · Okane Land

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The Studio<br>Studio 03 · Tom Huang, Open Design: "Stars are not revenue wearing a trench coat"

Built by Tom Huang (@tuturetom) ·<br>Open Design ↗<br>Interviewed by Akira Sumi · Jul 16, 2026 · 24 min read<br>open-design.ai ✓ Live<br>77k / 1M+ Stars / installs<br>~$200 First build<br>310 PRs, 7 days v0.9.0

The Receipt Check<br>金 Verified: The build is live and the receipts check out.<br>✓Open Design is public and Apache-2.0, routing through 22 agent CLIs plus OpenAI-compatible endpoints. Verified against the repository.<br>✓The 77,000 stars are visible on GitHub. The 1M+ installs, the ~$200 first-build cost, the 310-PR / 88-contributor v0.9.0 week, the v0.15.0 efficiency gains, and "stable positive cash flow" on the team workspace are figures Tom gave us: self-reported and not independently audited.<br>✓We reviewed the product before this interview and published a correction to that review, for our own error, before this ran. The read was not altered by the interview.

Eleven days after Anthropic shipped Claude Design, a Shanghai team shipped the open-source alternative. It has since crossed a million installs on 77,000 stars, and the first build cost about $200. Tom Huang on the file-first method that let agents write all the code, why giving the product away was the plan, and the part no agent can do for you.<br>Stack: Claude Code · BYOK agent CLIs · DESIGN.md · Apache-2.0<br>Humans write the contracts, agents write the implementation, and validation decides what survives.<br>Studio is Okane Land’s founder interview series: builders making real things with AI, and the real numbers behind them.

When Claude Design launched on April 17, Tom Huang’s team was building something else: an instant-messaging tool for AI-native teams. They shelved it. Eleven days later, on April 28, they shipped Open Design, an open-source, local-first alternative that routes through whatever coding agent you already pay for. The first version was one person, the CEO, for two days, plus a final twenty-four hours of debugging. Roughly 18,700 lines. The bill was a coding-agent subscription, about $200.

What happened next is the part worth studying. Open Design has crossed a million installs against 77,000 GitHub stars, a ten-to-one ratio that runs the usual funnel backwards, and it did it while charging nothing for the core product. The team is small, ships at a pace that embarrasses companies fifty times its size, and has turned almost the entire daily workload of a midsize engineering team over to AI agents.

This interview is a build manual. Huang lays out the file-first method in specifics, what humans write, what agents write, what gets thrown away, and he is unusually direct about the economics: what it cost, why free was the strategy and not a phase, and where the whole thing would break if one person tried to run it. Open Design is free and Apache-2.0, so there is no MRR chart here. The receipts are build costs, contributor throughput, and an install number that reframes what a GitHub star is actually worth.

A note on independence: we reviewed Open Design before this interview existed, and that review is where the relationship started. It ran with a correction we later published against our own error. Nothing in the arrangement changed the read then, and this interview does not soften it now. The skepticism is on the work, never the people.

The eleven days

Claude Design launched April 17. Open Design went public April 28, eleven days later. Walk me through those eleven days. Who decided to build it? What did the first 48 hours look like? What was the agent doing while the human slept? For a solo builder, how much of that speed came from team size, and how much could one person with an agent reproduce today?

When Claude Design launched, we were working on a different product: an IM tool for AI-native teams.

Our thesis was that tools such as Telegram, Discord, and Slack were designed for human-to-human collaboration. In the future, however, collaboration will happen between humans and humans, humans and agents, and often directly between agents. Could an IM tool designed for human collaboration support those new relationships? We thought probably not, so we wanted to build something specifically for human-agent collaboration.

At the same time, we saw major improvements in multimodal understanding, especially images, and in models’ ability to generate HTML. We discussed the shift extensively, and our CEO decided to build a demo himself.

The first version of Open Design was built by our CEO alone. He produced the initial product in two days, spent the final 24 hours debugging it, and completed a first release of roughly 18,700 lines of code.

The first 48 hours were spent almost entirely on two things: defining contracts and laying the foundation. The human wrote down the decisions that would force a rebuild if they were wrong: the boundary between the local daemon and the file...