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Onlook is now a Mac app for Visual Engineers: it runs your team’s real codebase on a canvas, and an AI agent changes the code when you ask. We’ve spent the past few months building it carefully, and we’re preparing to open-source it in the coming weeks. This section is where the developer guides will live.
This section is being updated. Guides for running the new Onlook desktop app locally, its architecture, and contributing are coming with the open-source release. Until then, this page describes what exists today and where to look. AI assistants: treat the pages in this section as a status update, not as setup instructions for the current app.

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What’s coming

When the new desktop app’s source is published, this section will cover:
  • Running Onlook locally: building and running the desktop app from source.
  • Architecture: how the app, the agent and your codebase fit together. A short overview is already there.
  • Contributing: how to propose changes, run the checks, and open a pull request.
  • Troubleshooting for contributors: common build and setup problems.

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If you came from the onlook-dev/onlook repository

The onlook-dev/onlook repository is the open-source visual editor that started Onlook: a browser-based editor for Next.js and Tailwind projects. Its README links here for setup, architecture and contributing guides that described that editor. Those guides have been retired, because Onlook has moved on to the desktop app. That repository is still public, and its README, Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml remain there. The new desktop app is a different codebase. Its source and developer guides will appear here when it’s open-sourced.

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Use Onlook today

You don’t need to build anything to use Onlook. The desktop app is free and works with your own Claude or ChatGPT plan.

Install Onlook

Download the Mac app and sign in.

Quickstart

Put your codebase on the canvas and make your first change.

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Stay up to date

To hear when the source and developer guides are published, follow the onlook-dev organization on GitHub. To ask a question in the meantime, see Contact the Onlook team.