alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Klad, a paint app your coding agent can drive (source-available)
I've been developing applications for a long time and have turned to game development as well lately. One of the things that frustrated me the most was that using AI agents for game development is very annoying in the art department. Your only options right now are to either use an image genAI model and roll the dice every time you want to make an edit, or have your agent draw with something like vectors.
I was looking for an application that would allow me to ask an agent to make a first draft of whatever art I needed with actual brushes, and then be able to go in myself and edit every last stroke or layer that it created.
Klad is that application. Written in Rust, it can be fully controlled by an agent through the CLI, and every function is available in a nice UI as well: a brush engine, frame-by-frame animation (and bones/IK), vectors, text layers, colours, layer effects, infinite undo (even after re-opening the file!),…
Why I think it's useful for a wider audience: Adobe showed agents editing Photoshop files at MAX this week, with a private beta planned for early 2027.
Klad is built on the same core idea, with editable paint strokes as core architecture, and it works today.
Clone the repo to try it out: https://github.com/klad-app/klad
You can basically point Claude to the repo, ask it to build it, and pick up the drawing skills. Then ask it to make any drawing you want! (After that, you or the agent can change absolutely every brush stroke in the app again, which makes edits a breeze.)
The quality of the drawings really depends on the agent you use. I have tried it with Claude Fable 5.2 since it came out on Monday, and the drawings are already quite impressive. I'm confident that this will only improve.
I use it every day on Mac, so that definitely works well. It builds on Linux too (tablet pen pressure still needs some work there). Windows builds in CI, I haven't used it there myself yet but I have some reports that it works perfectly fine.
Coming up next is support for pixel art. I'm in the testing phase with this right now, and I expect it to go live in the repo sometime this weekend.
Klad is source-available rather than open source: free to build and use for individuals and small companies, and I plan to sell pre-built binaries later, the way Aseprite does. The file format, CLI reference and agent skill are MIT.
What I want to hear from people who try it: Can your agent work out the CLI without help, and where does it get confused? Can you go in and change one of its strokes easily?
The command reference and guides are available at https://klad.studio
I'll be here answering any questions about the technical side as well, as it's a pretty interesting challenge to build a performant engine with editable brush strokes that render as paint.
Comments
This is pretty fun! I had an agent (Opus 5.5) poke around and make some characters which are less obviously LLM-generated than what you normally see.
Neat, any plans to take a swing at sculpting? Frontier models are still not great at that
I have been meaning to find/build a tool that would sit in between the pre-production assets of a movie clip (script, characters, locations, prop assets) and the moment you press generate.
I envisioned it as some sort of a flipbook that would allow me to *cheaply* get a low-res idea of what the 'generate' click would get me, without having to burn movie making tokens.
This may not be exactly it, but it nudged me into a direction. Thanks!
I will give it a try and report back.
Amazing thank you! This is going to be fun when creating hobby games
I have been trying to build something similar as well. Is there a browser version to try or an MCP?
Sorry if I missed it, but how is it different from having the "agent" write SVG code?
The project looks really cool. Do you have an average measure of the time taken for a generation and the number of tool calls?
Hmm this is interesting, perhaps you could pair it with image gen and add code to seperate the layers instead of individual brush strokes. Could be very token costly. Will try though
I had a similar idea, but for photo manipulation.
I like photography, but I'm relatively poor on the photo editing. I was hoping to build an MCP server around Gimp/Darktable/RawTherapee. The idea would be that the user would describe changes he wanted to see in the image (brighten up the shirt), and the LLM would pick appropriate tools to select the region and make the edit.
At the time I looked into it, it didn't seem that Darktable/RawTherapee provided APIs to hook into. Then life got busy.
This looks very interesting, so the outputs are svg? Will definitely give it a try
In the future, I wonder if agents will still try to leave some sort of hard to detect “watermark” using this new generation of tools?
This is a really great tool that solves a specific pain point with image models though
Nice job~~
So I've done a little bit of testing. When I loaded up the editor, I expected it to communicate with the installed binaries for my large language models, or possibly use a BYOK (bring your own key) approach. But once I understood that it's driven from the command line and you see the changes happen in the editor that gets spun up, I had no problems.
I've been experimenting a fair amount with LLMs driving procedural graphics myself, although my experiments have been mostly limited to relatively low-resolution stuff, such as EGA adventure game graphics.
So I decided to put Klad through a relatively hard test: I took a reference picture of an illustrated squirrel and asked it to recreate it, then set up the rigging for a basic walk cycle. This was using Fable 5.2 high.
Then I did the same thing, but with a more traditional approach, using standard generative models to manually create a walk cycle. This was all done relatively quickly, so bear that in mind.
Here are the results. I still think these are early days, and LLM-driven graphics are only going to improve.
And there are obvious advantages to a procedural system with rigging: Much easier to maintain consistency, palette control, and the ability to make precise alterations without having to deal with any kind of conventional in-painting nonsense.
https://imgpb.com/vJFpP