Recto: A desktop app where you can design with AI, edit with your mouse
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HN · launched Nov 3, 2026 · 8 upvotes (top 50%) · 0 views
Niche: ai ui and graphic design tools · 130 launches, 15 in the last 7 days ▲ +36% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Content generation
- Prosumer
- AI-native
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 130 launches in ai ui and graphic design tools →
Could you build this?
Partial The shell of a desktop app that embeds coding-agent CLIs and shows a live preview is vibe-codeable, but reliably mapping direct mouse edits on a rendered design back to source code across agents is a hard engineering problem.
What it would actually take: Build an Electron or Tauri desktop app with an embedded terminal per agent (CLI processes via PTY), a local dev-server preview, and an overlay that maps DOM elements to source locations. The hard part is the bidirectional sync between visual edits and source files, plus handling concurrent edits from multiple agents without conflicts. This needs someone experienced with editor/AST tooling and webview internals.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Claude Design, Claude, ChatGPT
Concerns raised: Site overflows horizontally on mobile
Feature requests: Fix horizontal scrolling on mobile
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 3575 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #1756 of 3576 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 370 days after the earliest competitor.
- cutvii · github · 2026-10-22 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.65
- rovar · github · 2026-09-26 · 38 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- Recto · hn · 2026-11-08 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- I've built a Cursor alternative in browser. AI Coding Agent. · hn · 2025-11-28 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- Minicor - Windows desktop automations at scale. · yc · 2026-03-23 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- Skills Hub, a desktop app for managing AI agent skills · hn · 2026-10-12 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- kissopen · github · 2026-10-06 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- Open-Source AI Native IDE Cursor Alternative · hn · 2026-07-02 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.58
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