Kiln

The gap

Lovable and its equivalents let you describe an app and get one you can look at, which is a genuinely useful loop — but they are limited in what they can produce. Meanwhile a lot of people have already committed to a terminal coding agent, because the ones they pay for are more capable and more flexible. The problem is that those give you a wall of terminal output and no screen.

What it does

It connects to the terminal coding agent you already use and adds the layer that is missing: you get something running that you can open and look at, rather than a diff and a summary. You are not buying another agent and not paying twice — it drives the harness you are already subscribed to.

The hard part

Connecting properly to agents like Claude Code and OpenCode. Not running the CLI — wiring it up so the agent, the harness and the subscription you already have all behave like one coherent tool rather than a subprocess spewing into a terminal. That integration is where the real work went.

How it is built

TypeScript — about 97% of the repository by bytes, the rest CSS and HTML. The CLI and the scaffolding live in the same codebase as the project shape it generates.

Where it is

It works, but it is limited rather than general. There is no hosted demo, so the repository is currently the only way to try it.

What I learned

• The useful layer over an agent is usually not the model — it is everything around the model that makes the output checkable.
• Not making people pay twice for the same capability changes whether something gets adopted at all.

What it doesn't do yet

Listed deliberately — a project's limits are as useful to a reviewer as its features.

• Works, but limited — it is not general-purpose yet.
• Assumes a Node-based project shape.
• No public demo; the repo is the only way in.
• New and actively changing.