Your AI coding buddy can now paint with you, stroke by stroke

An indie developer has launched Klad, a unique 2D painting and animation app designed specifically for collaboration with coding agents. Instead of generating final pixel images, Klad provides agents like Claude Code or Codex with a command-line interface to manipulate real digital brushes, layers, and timelines, creating drawings composed of thousands of individual, editable strokes and fills.

This approach transforms AI-assisted art creation from a black-box 'reroll' process into a collaborative, precise workflow. Developers and artists can guide an agent to create complex assets—like a game character with 4,344 strokes—and then directly tweak any element hours later. It represents a fascinating middle ground between fully automated image generation and manual digital art, giving coders a new kind of creative tool that respects the precision of data over the randomness of pixels.