Cool to see someone has!
Is this kind of like a Karpathy 2nd brain for investing then?
Hey HN! I'm Daniel, building Onlook, the Cursor for Designers. We built an open-source collaborative canvas for code that lets designers and developers craft incredible web experiences together.Since launching, Onlook hit #1 on Hacker News, was the #1 trending repo on GitHub—above DeepSeek + Anthropic—and has earned over 23,000 GitHub stars. We’re looking to bring on Onlook’s first Founding...
Onlook is an AI-native visual editor that lets designers, PMS, and engineers collaborate directly in the browser. We launched earlier this year, hit #1 on Hacker News, became the #1 trending repo on GitHub (above DeepSeek + Anthropic), and have grown to 22,000+ stars. We’re now hiring our first Founding Engineer.
We’re a design-led, product-obsessed team backed by YC, and we’re building a next-generation visual IDE used by tens of thousands of designers and engineers.
What we’re looking for:
• Full-stack engineer comfortable owning large, ambiguous problems
• Strong bias toward building fast and shipping often
• High craft, strong opinions, and willingness to defend them
• Desire to build an open-source product in public
• Someone who wants to help shape the culture, architecture, and direction from day one
Tech: Next.js, Tailwind, tRPC, Supabase, Drizzle, Bun, Docker, Anthropic, AI SDK.
What you’ll do: You’ll work across the stack, contribute to one of the fastest-growing OSS projects ever backed by YC, design and ship core parts of the visual editor, work with 100+ contributors, and help define the product with real users. If you’re in SF, we have a beautiful office near South Park.
How to stand out: Share something you’ve built. A project, repo, or portfolio tells us more than a resume.
Email me directly [email protected] or apply at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/onlook/jobs/e4gHv1n-fo...
- How are you handling tax/VAT and edge cases? Like usage backfills or retroactive credit grants, etc. etc.
- What’s the failure mode if your service is down?
Either way, refreshing to see someone go after this with the opinionated DX!
Our Website: https://onlook.com/ Our Repo: https://github.com/onlook-dev/onlookApply here: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/onlook/jobs/e4gHv1n-fo...or email daniel [at] onlook.comWe're Onlook, the Cursor for Designers.We made an open-source (18k stars) visual editor for code that lets anyone craft changes to codebases using AI on an infinite canvas. We just had a blowout launch of our...
Definitely going to ask my cofounder to look into implementing this.
- Are there other use cases for this tech besides language translation? Wondering if there are other eng problems that something like this could solve.
- Where are you guys thinking of taking this next? Seems like you're able to handle a lot of languages, so are you just continuing to refine the product or what's the plan for the next couple months and years?
Thanks for tackling this!
Sonnet 4 has been producing much more reliable outputs, but it's always a challenge to push it to get really creative. I think there are probably great ways we could be prompting for more creative output, but something we'll need to keep experimenting with for sure.
If you use our Desktop Product – https://onlook.com/download - you can import your projects there and use a lot more features like Layers, Components, Pages and more.
We don't have the ability for you to import existing repos for this beta product just yet, but it's something we'll be enabling in the coming weeks for sure.
Thanks for mentioning it!
Hang-tight!
It's been a challenge to find the right balance for this – on one hand you want to give people who know what code is an easy way to navigate their codebases and be more effective, and on the other hand you want to help people who have never coded before create something they really love.
The visual layer has a lot of polish left to do to be a perfect design tool experience, but we're getting there.
I think for most designers they don't love being limited by traditional web "structures" like flexbox, but that's also how things can get built and scale properly. AI is very good at generating flexbox styled websites but when a designer jumps-in to an AI generated website it's like picking up a complex project someone else has architected. If you know how websites work it isn't super intimidating, but if you don't then it can feel very overwhelming.
One of the main reasons we decided to not have layers and styles immediately visible on the left and right sides of the app was because people who have never jumped into a design tool mentioned they were overwhelmed with the UI. Moving these tools into a "secondary" interaction layer cleared up the interface but made it easy for pro-users to still find them.
I'm excited to keep refining this editor experience so when you're able to import projects you have all of the tools you'd expect from a visual editor for your codebase.
In the meantime, can you try asking Onlook again? I know it's inconveniant.
If nothing loads on the page, try clicking the text on the page, then prompting from the chat asking it to create a part or section of the website or thing you've prompted. Sometimes there's just a ton of code that gets rendered and doesn't apply, so shortening the length of the output manually with a smaller prompt may help.
Something we definitely need to fix though
Can you try it again and see? Or, click on the page, then add your screenshot to the chat with your prompt.
Honestly doing 3D may be a bit tricky in Onlook but super curious to see if you get it to work. It works just like a normal browser would, but the complexity of knowing how to setup a 3D site like that may be too advanced for Onlook.
I'm excited about the infinite canvas too – it makes it a lot more fun to move around and design.
I'm super fired up about this new version of Onlook for two reasons:
1) It makes it so much easier to jump in and start designing and
2) We have a much more intuitive, simplified toolbar control for styles that makes it even easier to craft your designs.
This has been the third major version of Onlook, and each time has felt like a leap towards solving the gap between design and development. Our first product was a Chrome Extension, the second was a downloadable desktop app (Onlook Studio), and now we're releasing Onlook for Web.
For all of the designers and non-technical people that just need a way to share their ideas with their engineering colleagues, the beta of this web version is a great start. But our goal continues be to truly solve the gap, so we'll be adding tons of great features that will let you go beyond ideation to actual implementation on real codebases.
Some known bugs:
– Sometimes generations don't "apply" after they're loaded: Kiet is working on a fix for this, but try clicking on the blank-template and re-prompting your change.
- It can take a long time to load the AI chat: We're working on making this faster (or at least a little more entertaining).
- Sometimes nothing shows up in the chat: Try going back to the homepage and re-prompting. This is something we want to make smoother.
– Sometimes styles don't apply: Let us know! We're trying to catch the edge cases.
Thank you all for your help and patience as we work through this early preview. Please join us on our Discord [https://discord.gg/ZZzadNQtns] and report any bugs or issues on GitHub repo: https://github.com/onlook-dev/onlook