klad

Give your agent real brushes. klad is a 2D painting and animation app you share with a coding agent. You paint in the editor with a pen. The agent paints through the klad command line, with the same brushes, on the same drawing, and each of you sees the other's strokes instantly.

Don't want to build it? Sign up for the pre-built app release at klad.studio.

There is no image model in klad. Your agent (Claude Code, Codex, anything that can run commands) decides what to paint; klad gives it brushes, layers and a timeline. Whatever either of you puts down stays what it was: a stroke with its path, pressure, brush and colour, a shape with its points, a fill with its region. So there's no rerolling and hoping for the best: if one leaf looks off, you fix that leaf.

Drawings made with Claude Fable 5.2: the creature, the scene and the prop kit were painted stroke by stroke through the klad command line.

• Site and guides: klad.studio, with these drawings replayed stroke by stroke.
• Made with klad: made something? Send it in for the gallery on klad.studio.
• Licence: source-available, not open source. Free to build and use for yourself, and inside a company with less than 500,000 euros a year in revenue. See Licence.
• Runs on: macOS, with pen pressure and tilt. It also builds and passes its tests on Linux and Windows, checked on every change: see What's rough.
• Status: early, and you build it yourself: see Try it.

Why not just generate the picture?

An image generator hands you pixels, and the only edit left is another roll of the dice. klad keeps every stroke and every fill as data: where it went, how hard it was pressed, its brush and its colour. Pick any of them hours later, yours or the agent's, and recolour it, bend it, move it or delete it.

• It's paint, not just vectors. A stroke keeps its path and pressure like a vector does, and still lands as paint. Loaded oil leaves ridges that catch the light, and smudge drags the paint already on the layer. The smudge stays a stroke too: move it later and klad blends it again where it lands.
• It can also do just vectors. Shapes with editable points, gradients, glows and real text in about fifty open fonts that come with it, for posters, covers and cards.
• It's a full painting and animation app. Two dozen brushes and a brush editor, layers, masks, clipping, effects, a timeline with onion skins and clips, in-betweens made from your key drawings, bones with IK, and exports as PNGs, sprite sheets, GIFs or straight into Godot.
• It does pixel art on a real grid. Whole pixels in the colours of a palette, with tiles, palette variants and Aseprite files in and out: see Pixel art.
• Your drawings stay yours. A drawing is a folder of plain files on your computer, and klad needs no account. It only looks for a new version once a day, and you can turn that off. An edit changes only the files of what it edits, so drawings live well in git.

Working with your agent

1. Ask. Tell your agent what the drawing needs, in plain words: a lantern for the inn, lit from the left, on its own layer.
2. Watch. It paints through the klad command line, and its strokes show up in your editor as it works.
3. Point. Pin a note on the canvas or select the part you mean ("more moss on this side"). The agent reads both.
4. Take over. Repaint whatever you like by hand, the agent's strokes as much as your own. Its strokes are marked as its own and every change is one step in a shared history, so you can undo any of it.

The prompt to start with is under Try it. klad comes with three agent skills, all in docs/skill/ and all MIT, so use them with any agent and any tool:

• klad skill: the tool. How to look at a drawing, change it and check the result.
• klad skill drawing: the craft. Planning a picture, light on form, values, edges, colour, materials and how to judge the result.
• klad skill pixel: the same for pixel art, and for animating a sprite.

What an agent paints depends on the agent and on how much you steer it. The skills teach it the tool and some craft; the pen in your hand does the rest.

For developers: the drawing is data

Everything you can do in the editor has a klad command too, so a script or an agent works on the same drawing you have open. It reads strokes as JSON, changes any of them by its address and applies batches of edits as JSON ops.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗