Dessn: start here

Dessn is a design canvas where every frame is the person's real app, running live from their own code. That gives you what a drawing canvas can't:

• Your code lives in the frame. A frame holds the app's whole codebase and is yours to read and write (dessn_files_read, dessn_files_write): each write answers its build and new picture in seconds, with no credits, and the person presses Play and clicks through it. Push a local working tree onto a frame and take its change home as a patch, its commits or a bundle, so it stays 1:1 with the local code. That frame API is what Dessn is good at; HTML frames are for notes, annotations and visuals that are no screen of the app (an OG image, a deck, a moodboard).

• Frames are the real app: its own components and data, at any route. Every route of an app goes on a page in one call, and a live site's URL becomes a frame beside your design.
• Its design system, with file:line: dessn_designSystem_get answers the components the app really uses, its tokens, and how each kind of UI is done in it.
• Git both ways: push a local working tree onto a frame, and take a frame's change home as a patch, its commits or a bundle (skill dessn-sync).
• Any agent, local or in the cloud: a remote MCP with OAuth, so cloud agents and web chats (Codex Cloud, Cursor's cloud agents, claude.ai, ChatGPT) use it as well as an agent on the person's computer. Writing a frame's code and capturing a URL are for the person's own agent on their computer; a cloud agent asks Dessn's design agent for those.

Its words:

• Project: one app (a repository). Its Library is the app set up once from the repository: its surfaces, each a route of the app with a saved picture and its design system index.
• Page: a board in a project. It holds frames, notes, text, images, arrows and sections.
• Frame: a live copy of the app on its own cloud sandbox, showing one route. What it shows is its code: change the code and the frame rebuilds. Its picture is the truth of how it looks.
• Design system: the components, tokens and patterns Dessn indexed from the app's code (dessn_designSystem_get).