ilse

ilse is a visual feedback layer for AI code agents. It puts a toolbar on top of the React app you already have running in your browser, letting you click an element, write a note, or drag, resize, and tweak things directly on the live interface. Those instructions then reach the coding agent you already use — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor CLI, Gemini CLI, or any agent that speaks MCP — already pointing at the right spot in your code. ilse is built for developers and designers whose app already exists and who want to refine its interface without leaving it, on their own machine, using their project's own tokens and components. The problem ilse addresses is captured in the maker's own story. He had been a designer for over nine years and found himself spending more time in code than in Figma. He would ask Claude Code to fix a button, describe in words what he saw on screen, and the agent would edit the wrong file. As he puts it, the agent writes well, but it does not see what he sees — it was missing a designer's eye. So ilse was built so he could point at the real app, let ilse gather the context, and have the agent change the code. The site draws an explicit line between ilse and generators such as Lovable, Claude Design, and Replit: those are described as great for starting from scratch in their own environment, while ilse is for when the code already exists and lives on your machine. The core of the product is Design Mode. You click an element or select some text and write what should change. The note reaches your agent already pointing at the right spot in the code, so there is no loose "crooked button" description to interpret. That is the point-and-say workflow: the instruction is anchored to a specific element in a specific file rather than to a vague verbal description of a screen. The panel extends that same idea with gestures. Move, resize, edit text, and choose whether a change applies only to this instance or to all of them. There is also a Draw control and Screens, which is marked as new. Drag lets you reorder elements, and you can tweak spacing and colors using your project's own tokens. Simple tweaks land instantly with no AI involved, spending few or zero tokens, while anything that goes beyond a class mapping is handed to your agent to change in the code. A component library is listed as a Pro capability. Before calling your agent, ilse does the search for it. What the agent receives includes the element's file and line with only the snippet that matters, the component that wrote the JSX and where it is used, your project's design tokens, your note plus the panel tweaks and gestures you made, what a test found (the journey step, the screen, and the element), and any pasted references you optionally add. This context packaging is what replaces the agent guessing at which file to edit. Test Mode, available in Pro, is the second major capability. You describe what a person does — the site's example is "buy the lamp" — and ilse walks the flow in the real app on its own, then shows where it got stuck and reports what breaks. Pro is described as test mode with accessibility, errors, layout, the memory, and journeys, plus the Library's hands: dragging components onto the page, their copies, and taking your design system to other tools. A Review Mode is listed as coming soon: reviewers would leave notes on your product's own link without needing an account, and those notes would reach both you and the agent so the loop starts again. The overall workflow is deliberately lightweight. You run npx ilse-design@latest in your project folder; Next.js, Vite, CRA, Remix, and Astro are detected on its own; the app opens at the usual address with the bar on top. There is no extension, no app, and no account. ilse runs on your machine as a CLI and an MCP server, and the agent you already pay for is the one that changes the code. The loop is refine, test, and repeat. Privacy is a structural part of the design rather than an add-on. Everything runs on your computer and ilse has no server to send your code to. The code, the context, and the history stay local. ilse never touches a key — your agent is the one calling the AI. And the bar only exists on the dev server, so the final production build ships nothing. ilse describes itself as an agentic WYSIWYG rather than a faster generator, and it does not generate anything from scratch. The site's comparison table frames the difference: generators start from a blank prompt, while ilse starts from the app that already runs; generators produce code generated anew, while ilse edits your repo in place; generators apply whatever design system the tool picks, while ilse uses your tokens and components; and generators use the platform's AI on its credits, while ilse uses the agent you already use. A testimonial on the page from Huxley Dias of Punk Metrics states that if you develop locally, this is excellent for refining interfaces, and calls it way better than Claude Design, Replit, and Lovable. The benefits follow directly from that approach. Because simple tweaks map to a class and land instantly, common adjustments cost few or zero tokens. Because the note arrives with the file, the line, and the component context attached, the agent no longer edits the wrong file. Because your own tokens and components are part of the context, refinements stay inside your design system instead of introducing a parallel one. And because everything runs locally against your dev server, your code and history never leave your machine. Concrete use cases described on the site include clicking any element in a demo shop interface to change it, reordering items by dragging, resizing elements, editing text in place, tweaking spacing and colors against your tokens, and pasting optional references into the note. Test Mode covers journeys such as buying a lamp, where ilse walks the flow and identifies the step, screen, and element where it got stuck. Design Mode covers the everyday case of pointing at a crooked pixel and telling the agent what to do about it. ilse works with any React project that has a dev server. The listed frameworks are Next.js, Vite, Remix, Astro, and React, with CRA mentioned as auto-detected. Styling and component systems listed are Tailwind, shadcn/ui, Radix, and MUI, and the project's design tokens and components go into the context. Supported agents include Claude Code, Codex, Cursor CLI, Gemini CLI, Cline, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, Goose, and any agent with MCP. Pricing is free for the core tool under the PolyForm Shield license, which allows free use including at work as long as you do not turn it into a competing product. A founder pre-sale offers Pro at US$49 instead of US$79 as a one-time payment, limited to the first 10 founders, with Pro shipping by November 30, 2026, a refund if it does not, renewals locked at the founder price, a roadmap vote, a direct channel with early builds, and a 30-minute 1:1 setup. The Pro purchase includes 12 months of updates counted from Pro's launch, after which the version you have stays yours. In short, ilse's value proposition is precision: you show the agent what you mean by pointing at the real running app, ilse gathers the code context so the instruction lands in the right place, and your existing agent makes the change in your repo with your tokens — all locally, with nothing shipped to production.