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Built-in AI

Brilliant has an AI agent built into the canvas. It reads your file, sees your selection, and runs real design commands on your behalf: creating elements, editing properties, running layout commands, searching across canvases, and exporting. You describe the outcome, and it builds it while you watch, in native elements you can keep editing by hand.

This page is the map of what the built-in AI is and how it fits together. If you just want to send your first prompt, jump to Your First AI Chat.

Bring your own key

The chat is bring-your-own-key (BYOK) only. Every request goes straight from the app to the provider you chose, using your own API key or your local Claude Code login. Nothing routes through Brilliant's servers, there is no hosted Brilliant AI, and you pay your provider directly. The details of exactly what is sent, and what never is, are in Privacy and consent.

Connect a provider in a couple of clicks, or route through a Claude Code subscription you already have. See Providers and models, which deepens the quick-start in Connect an AI Provider.

What it can do on the canvas

Once a session is running, the AI can:

  • Create designs as native, editable elements: UIs, pages, dashboards, illustrations, diagrams, wireframes.

  • Edit existing work: change properties, reparent, rename, delete, reorder.

  • Run app commands (align, distribute, auto layout, components, and more), each with full undo.

  • Read your selection and search the canvas by name, text, type, color, or component.

  • Export to PNG, JPEG, WebP, SVG, PDF, or HTML/React.

  • Generate images and vectors and place them on the canvas.

The full tour with before-and-after examples is in What the AI can do.

How it differs from an external agent

Brilliant works two ways, and both are valid:

  • The built-in chat (this section) is docked in the app. You get selection-aware inputs, per-chat undo, color and position pickers, and progressive previews that stream onto the canvas as each step lands. It runs on your key.

  • An external agent over MCP (Use with AI agents) drives the same canvas from your own editor, like Claude Code or Cursor.

Same canvas, same undo stack. Many designers keep both around.

Where it lives

The AI input sits in the bottom toolbar. Press / on the canvas, or click the field, to focus it and open the chat panel. Sessions dock as tabs, run in parallel, and persist between launches. The full walkthrough of panels, tabs, and shortcuts is in Sessions and chat.

Try before you connect

With no provider connected, the chat opens in Playground mode: it replays bundled demo conversations end to end, so you can see how the agent behaves before committing a key. Connect any provider and it flips to real sessions. More on that in Connect an AI Provider.

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