Show HN: Klad, a paint app your coding agent can drive (source-available)

Klad is a 2D painting and animation app designed for people and coding agents to work on the same drawing. Rather than generating a flattened image, an agent uses Klad’s command-line tools to paint with brushes and create fills and shapes as editable data: strokes retain their paths, pressure, brush, and colour. Changes appear in the open editor, where a person can select, move, recolour, or delete the agent’s work, add canvas notes, and undo edits through shared history. The central argument is that this makes agent-created artwork practical to refine: individual parts can be corrected later instead of regenerating the whole picture. Demonstrations include a creature painted stroke by stroke, then grouped and animated without repainting its frames.

Klad includes about two dozen brushes, editable vector shapes, layers, masks, effects, text, a timeline, in-betweens, and bone-based rigging; it exports PNGs, sprite sheets, and Godot assets. Its command line can perform the editor’s operations, read drawing data as JSON, and apply batches of edits. Drawings are stored as ordinary local files, need no account, and are suitable for version control. The project is early and must currently be built from source, which takes about ten minutes initially. It supports pressure and tilt on macOS; Linux currently starts with mouse input, while Windows builds and passes tests but has not yet been tested for drawing. The license is source-available, permitting personal use and use in companies earning under €500,000 annually.