Brilliant

Brilliant (brilliant.design) is a professional 2D vector design tool for human and AI agent collaboration on one canvas, calling itself the GitHub of design. Disambiguation: it is not brilliant.org (the STEM math learning platform) and is unrelated to the identically named Mac annotation tool or the bankrupt smart-home brand Brilliant.

Core capabilities

• Agent collaboration on canvas: a built-in AI Chat connects to Claude Code / Cursor / Codex in one click over bidirectional MCP (127.0.0.1:3333) to manipulate vector primitives directly
• Plain-text .bl files: Blueprint (.bl, spec bp:v1) plain-text files work with Git, PR diffs, and git blame, using roughly 20x fewer tokens than JSON
• Figma-grade editing: vector boolean operations, auto layout, component variants, and OKLCH design tokens, with shortcuts matching Figma
• Native GPU shaders: a self-built GPU engine (Rust + wgpu) ships about 50 shader presets (glass / metal / iridescent)
• Multi-format export: 10 formats including SVG/PDF/HTML/React JSX/PNG/MP4, plus two-way Figma import
• Cross-platform: macOS/Windows desktop apps plus a web editor (requires WebGPU)

Use cases Developers and design engineers already using coding agents; small teams that want Figma-grade capability without paying seat fees; and design-system maintainers who treat tokens as compilable programs.

Unique strengths Where Figma uses proprietary .fig cloud files, Brilliant's plain-text .bl makes designs diffable and branchable like code, and wires agents directly into the canvas.

Editorial verdict Public beta since April 2026; .bl, MCP, and code export are all backed by documentation and hands-on checks, and the company is transparent. Honest caveats: it is still v0.1.0-beta, has no interactive prototyping, a thin ecosystem, and a small bootstrapped team; publicly published work defaults to public and grants training licenses, refunds are restricted, and liability is capped at just $100.