Manifesto.

Something broke this year. Software stopped being written by hand. The best builders no longer type code; they align intent with a capable model. The number of people who can create software just went from millions to everyone.

But watch those builders work and you'll see something strange. Their agents write the code, run the tests, ship the deploy. Then the product needs to look like something, behave like something, feel like something: and suddenly it's screenshots pasted into chats, "a bit more to the left," hex codes in prompts. The most automated workflow in history, bottlenecked by describing rectangles in English.

Nobody has said this out loud yet: when agents write the code, the code stops being the source of truth. You don't edit compiled output. You edit the source, and the toolchain does the rest.

So what is the source now?

The contract: what the product looks like, and how it behaves. The design and the definition. Blueprint and markdown. Change the contract and the change propagates: through agents, through CI, into the product, the way source becomes binaries today. "The app doesn't behave right" stops meaning "file a ticket" and starts meaning "edit the definition."

That world needs a home. We built it.

Brilliant is a professional 2D vector design tool. Real pen tool, real booleans, components with variants, auto layout, design tokens, and a GPU engine we wrote from scratch that runs on macOS, Windows, and in your browser. Everything you expect from a decade of professional tools, faster.

Underneath it, one radical decision: every design is plain text. A language with a published spec that round-trips losslessly: the file on disk, the realtime wire, and the thing your agent reads and writes are the same text. Git blame a hero color. Review a redesign in a PR. Point any agent at your designs the way you point it at your codebase: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, any harness, any model, your keys. Zero markup on AI, forever.

When an agent touches a Brilliant canvas, its change is treated like source code: parsed, validated, normalized against your design system's tokens, linted against the real layout, and reviewed by the agent itself against a screenshot, before you ever see it. A rogue hex can't ship. An off-brand asset can't sneak through.

That is what teams actually want from AI design: not a slot machine of pretty pictures, but a system where the thousandth asset is as on-brand as the first, and where every element stays fully editable by hand. Direction stays yours. Taste stays yours.

Count the field honestly. Everyone building "AI design" made the same bet: the canvas is HTML and CSS. It demos beautifully, and it caps them forever: no real geometry, no engine-grade materials, no output beyond the web, a browser's ceiling on everything. And "no handoff" is only true when your product is a website they host. Everyone else's agent reimplements the design in the real codebase anyway.

We bet higher. The design is not the code, and not a picture of the code. It is the contract above the code. Nobody else is building there. The incumbent, meanwhile, is retrofitting agents onto a tool built for hands, sold by the seat.

VSCode is free; developers don't pay for the privilege of writing code. The Brilliant editor is free: the full professional tool, unlimited public work, unlimited agents, your own AI keys. Not a trial. Free.

We make money the way GitHub does: private work, teams, and the workflows that connect your contract to everything else. Simple, honest, aligned.

Models learned to build software from a decade of open source. The products of the next decade will be defined somewhere. We're building that somewhere.

Care to shape it?