Show HN: Hot Design – Like Hot Reload, but a Runtime Visual Designer

Hi HN,

Nick here, from the open-source Uno Platform team. You are likely familiar with Hot Reload, pioneered by Flutter. We’ve taken that concept further and built Hot Design, let me introduce it to you.

Architecturally, Hot Design idea is simple:

1. In your IDE, pause the live, running app at runtime, turning it into a designer.

2. Modify the UI directly on the designer —add elements, adjust layouts, tweak bindings etc.

3. Resume the app without restarting or losing state.

We built Hot Design to address the frustration of slow iteration cycles when building and tweaking UI or debugging data bindings in apps targeting multiple platforms.

Here’s a detailed explanation and a video of Hot Design in action: https://platform.uno/blog/hot-design-public-beta/

I can see potential criticism: It will get killed by AI, it’s another abstraction over code, it is .NET etc. Happy to respond to those comments if they come; we put a lot of thought into Hot Design and would love to hear it challenged!

Nick