--- title: I used this free AI-powered design app with my local... description: Paper is a hosted design tool where every canvas element is real HTML and CSS, making it natively readable and writable by AI agents. It ships with an MCP... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/i-used-this-free-ai-powered-design-app-with-my-local-llm-and-it-s-shockingly-capable-l6r75sgin twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: I used this free AI-powered design app with my local LLM, and it's shockingly capable | daily.dev og:description: Paper is a hosted design tool where every canvas element is real HTML and CSS, making it natively readable and writable by AI agents. It ships with an MCP... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/i-used-this-free-ai-powered-design-app-with-my-local-llm-and-it-s-shockingly-capable-l6r75sgin og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/l6R75SGIn.png og:image:alt: I used this free AI-powered design app with my local LLM, and it's shockingly capable og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # I used this free AI-powered design app with my local LLM, and it's shockingly capable **[XDA Developers](https://daily.dev/sources/xda-developers)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Paper is a hosted design tool where every canvas element is real HTML and CSS, making it natively readable and writable by AI agents. It ships with an MCP server featuring 24 bidirectional tools, allowing local LLMs (via LM Studio, Ollama, or other hosts) to read and write designs directly. The author tested it with Qwen 3.5 9B, generating component grids and design token sets for a meditation app aesthetic. Compared to Figma's read-only MCP setup, Paper's agent-first approach uses fewer tokens and requires no format translation. It supports Cursor, Claude Code, VS Code Copilot, and more as MCP hosts. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: --- Tags: [#mcp](https://daily.dev/tags/mcp), [#figma](https://daily.dev/tags/figma), [#local-ai](https://daily.dev/tags/local-ai) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/i-used-this-free-ai-powered-design-app-with-my-local-llm-and-it-s-shockingly-capable-l6r75sgin) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"I used this free AI-powered design app with my local LLM, and it's shockingly capable","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/i-used-this-free-ai-powered-design-app-with-my-local-llm-and-it-s-shockingly-capable-l6r75sgin","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/i-used-this-free-ai-powered-design-app-with-my-local-llm-and-it-s-shockingly-capable-l6r75sgin"},"datePublished":"2026-07-17T14:34:16.498Z","dateModified":"2026-07-17T14:38:13.142Z","description":"Paper is a hosted design tool where every canvas element is real HTML and CSS, making it natively readable and writable by AI agents. 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