Your coding agent paints, and either of you can edit any stroke
No more rerolls and hoping for the best: if one leaf looks off, just fix it. Klad is a source-available painting and animation app with a full CLI, so any coding agent can drive it.
161 stars on GitHubDiscussed on Hacker News
From people who tried it
“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.”
“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.”
Paint that stays editable
An image generator hands you pixels, and the only edit left is another roll of the dice. An agent in klad leaves strokes, and each one keeps its path, its pressure, its brush and its colour.
Editable doesn't mean flat shapes here. Loaded oil leaves ridges that catch the light, and smudge drags the paint that's already on the layer. The smudge stays a stroke too: move it hours later, and klad blends it again where it lands.
The drawing is a folder of plain files, so it lives in git beside your code: a commit shows which layers changed, and edits to different layers merge.
Working with your agent
Your agent paints through klad's command line, with the same brushes you use. Claude Code, Codex or anything else that runs in a terminal will do, and klad needs no account.
- 1
Ask
Tell your agent what the drawing needs, in plain words. Its strokes show up in your editor about a second later.
- 2
Point
Pin a note on the canvas or select the part you mean ("more moss on this side"). The agent reads both.
- 3
Take over
Repaint anything by hand, the agent's strokes as much as your own. It's one file, so the agent's next pass starts from your version.
Paste this to your agent
Run klad skill and read what it prints. Then make scene.klad and paint a night scene: a hooded traveller holding a lantern out to a ruined arch, a small creature following, flat shaded and lit by the lantern.
Get klad
klad is free to build from source today, for yourself and for companies under 500,000 euros a year, much like Aseprite. Rather install it with a double click? Join the list for the builds.