Recursica
Better UX for the internal tools
your teams use every day.
30 years of UX knowledge codified so AI agents design great UIs.
Recursica is an open-source design and development system for product teams. Product teams work side by side with AI agents that Border UX built from 30 years of design experience. Product owners and back-end engineers get to design better products, and designers get more done.
Free to set up without help, or set up and customized in 90 days by Border UX.
Stop making your engineers do UX.
Internal tools suffer from slow feature delivery, inconsistent user interfaces, high maintenance debt, and frustrated users. Generic AI coding tools lack your team's context, architectural rules, and design standards. It would be nice to have designers involved, but they are too busy and too few.
Stop skipping user research.
Real user research keeps getting cut because analysis can take weeks. Our research agents turn interview transcripts into themes, findings, and personas in hours. And every finding is fully traceable back to the original interview quotes.
Stop drawing static screens in Figma.
Managing variables in Figma is a full-time job. And a nightmare. The larger your design system, the more time designers spend editing variables instead of solving problems. The tools have gotten in the way. Recursica enables designers to build coded prototypes of their ideas.
Stop coding inconsistent experiences.
Your team is building more internal apps than ever with AI tools like Claude and Cursor. The catch? Every interface looks and works differently. Reinvented components and mismatched colors are creating a disjointed user experience. Recursica is your common component repo ready to go.
Human + AI UX design,
all via chat.
We work with our agents in open-source chat apps like Buzz and CircleChat, the same way people work with a teammate in Slack. When the work belongs in a terminal, the same agents run in Claude Code. Border UX builds and maintains the agents' skills using Anthropic's open standard, so they work on any platform that supports it.
Support keeps getting tickets about editing orders one at a time. Can we add bulk editing to the orders screen?
| Order | Customer | Status |
|---|---|---|
| #10482 | Hartley Goods | Pending |
| #10483 | Nomad Supply | Pending |
| #10484 | Field & Main | Shipped |
| #10485 | Copper Crate | Pending |
Is your design system agent-ready?
Agents are only as good as the system they build against. If your tokens live in three places and your rules live in people's heads, an agent will guess, and it will guess differently every time.
Take the quizWe wrote down everything we know.
The internet is full of opinions. Our knowledge holds Border UX's design judgment about components, screen design, and the psychology behind both, written as skills the agents read before every decision. The skills are plain markdown in a public repo, and any team can edit them or add its own research.
Components
One skill per component: every variant, every state, with accessibility built in.
Design rules
Border UX's opinions written down as rules: when a button beats a link, why a table shouldn't scroll sideways, what a dashboard is allowed to show.
Psychology references
The cognitive science basis underpinning the rules, with citations for where a limit came from and where it stops applying.
Three of our agents use this knowledge to design and review screens.
Betty, our UI designer agent, builds screens that follow the skills. Barb reviews each screen against the skills and reports every problem she finds. Alan maintains the knowledge itself: he looks for gaps or mistakes in the skills, then suggests a fix in a pull request or opens a GitHub issue.
Re-theme everything, light and dark mode included.
Stop updating hundreds of components one variable at a time. Colors, type, spacing, and elevation live as tokens in Theme Forge, and one export restyles every screen at once. Light and dark mode, contrast is checked for accessibility during styling, and managing various brands and app styles (e.g. native mobile or web app) is a snap.
Pick a theme and watch this whole page change:
Send up to 24,000 mails a month.
Standard
$29.99
/ monthExport to anywhere.
Export the whole theme as standard DTCG json, scoped and unscoped css, or push it straight to GitHub or GitLab. Nothing is locked in a plugin or a design tool.
A push opens a branch with the token files committed, and CI builds Storybook from it, so the designer reviews the real coded components in the new theme before anything merges. That entire loop happens without the designer writing a line of code. A developer reviews the pull request like any other change and merges it.
Export theme
Review any screen, then let the agents act on it.
Snippy is a design feedback extension for Google Chrome and Firefox. Open it on any web page, whether it's a prototype or a live site. Leave comments, mark up screenshots, and select DOM elements to point at exactly what's wrong. Snippy saves all of it in one report that the agents can read.
Betty, our UI designer agent, uses the report to revise the screen. Alan maintains the knowledge, so he reads the same report looking for gaps or mistakes in the skills. When he finds one, he suggests a fix in a pull request or opens a GitHub issue.
Snippy
Orders
"Set status" only ever marks orders as shipped. Rename it.
Order detail
The items table scrolls sideways on a laptop screen.
Now our designers can build pages faster and push changes quickly with less custom coding. What a difference.
Agents and people work together in every phase of design and development.
Research
- People interview stakeholders and users, and record transcripts.
- Agents read the transcripts and store each line in a database.
- Agents tag each line with its sentiment.
- Agents build a dictionary of key terms, and a person approves each one.
- Agents find themes, findings, and personas in the transcripts.
- People check each finding against the quote it came from, in a review app.
- Agents record those decisions so the knowledge stays current.
Theming and branding
- Designers create themes and customize the design system in Theme Forge.
- Designers stop managing tokens and variables in Figma.
- Every theme has light and dark mode, and every on-tone is checked for contrast against its tone.
- Agents keep token names consistent and the code up to date.
- Themes push to GitHub or download as CSS.
- Tokens use the W3C's standard DTCG format, so other tools can read them.
- Designer
- Ivan
Design
- Designers work in coded prototypes instead of Figma.
- Prototypes use real, themed components.
- Agents build screens using 30 years of Border UX design knowledge.
- Designers mark up prototypes with Snippy, and repeat feedback becomes a new rule.
- Works with an existing design system.
Built by the fun folks at Border UX
DIY
You have engineers, curiosity, and time to do it yourself.
Everything is MIT licensed and public: Theme Forge, the adapters, the design knowledge, and the agents. Clone the repositories and connect them to any stack.
- Customizable brand tokens and themes
- Component adapters for Mantine, Material UI, and Angular Material
- Clone the repo of Border UX's design rules and agent skills
- Agents run on any platform that supports skills, or in Buzz or CircleChat
Expert setup
You want the expert team that built Recursica to deploy it with you.
A 90-day engagement with the team that built Recursica. Border UX runs the user research, writes down the team's design rules, and hands off production-ready code, working alongside the team in its own workspace.
- Implementation and customization for internal apps
- People-led stakeholder and user interviews
- Custom branding and theming with expert designers
- Component library expansion and tailoring
- Team training and documentation
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