compose-ai-tools

See your Compose UI without opening Android Studio.

compose-ai-tools renders your @Preview composables to PNG from the command line — so your AI coding agent can actually look at the screen it just changed, and so can you. Works with Jetpack Compose (Android, via Robolectric) and Compose Multiplatform Desktop (via ImageComposeScene).

That's the whole idea. Everything else on this page is optional.

📖 Documentation · Install · Reference

Get started

Pick the one that fits you. Each is a single step.

🤖 With an AI coding agent

Run the one-line installer once. It drops the compose-preview CLI and the agent skill into place (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yschimke/skills/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Then just ask your agent to preview a composable. The compose-preview skill is the playbook — it tells the agent how to render, iterate, and check its own work. You don't have to learn the commands; the agent reads the skill. (If your agent can fetch URLs but not run the installer, point it straight at the SKILL.md — it bootstraps the CLI itself.)

🧩 In VS Code (or Cursor / Windsurf / VSCodium)

Open the Extensions view (⇧⌘X / Ctrl+Shift+X), search Compose Preview, click Install. It renders previews inline and needs no project changes. (Marketplace · Open VSX)

⌨️ From the command line

Install the CLI (same one-liner as above), then point it at any Compose project — no build edits required:

compose-preview render    # render every @Preview to PNG
compose-preview browse    # open the streamlined component browser

browse includes every preview-bearing module in one catalog. It automatically builds and uses a compatible CMP Wasm browser app (including the common :shared:ui → :webApp split), while JVM/Android-dependent components retain their baked preview and source-code experience. Use --module :app only when you deliberately want to narrow the catalog.

The CLI injects itself into your build at runtime, so projects that already apply com.android.application / com.android.library / org.jetbrains.compose just work.

Prefer a version-pinned Gradle plugin? It's on Maven Central (no auth, no token). See the Install page for that, CI recipes, and the full requirements (Java 17+, Gradle 8.13+, AGP 8.13.0+, Kotlin 2.0.21+).

What else it can do

None of this is required to get value from the tool — it's there when you want more than a PNG.

• Data products — alongside each PNG the renderer can emit structured data: accessibility findings, layout trees, theme tokens, recomposition heat maps, drawn text, resource captures, and more. One page per product.
• Agents & MCP — a push-based, token-frugal agent loop over Compose UI: target by semantic ref, observe semantics instead of pixels, diff renders, turn recordings into tests. The aria-snapshot story for Compose. The same native MCP process can optionally connect agents to a concurrent preview-server UI-builder session; see the MCP design reference.
• Daemon — an optional long-lived renderer that keeps Robolectric / Compose-Desktop warm so re-renders are fast.

Samples

Rendered baselines (PNGs and animation GIFs, regenerated on every push to main) are browsable inline on the compose-preview/main branch — samples:android, samples:wear, samples:cmp, and samples:remotecompose. Source under samples/. The XR renderer and its spatial sample live in compose-preview-xr. The integration matrix also renders the plugin against real-world external Compose projects on every push.

Agent PR hall of fame

Real-world PRs opened by AI coding agents that used compose-preview to verify their changes.

• yschimke/meshcore-mobile#36 — renders Play Store listing screenshots (phone + 7"/10" tablet) directly from Play Store — … @Preview composables, replacing hand-crafted PNGs.

Have one to add? Open a PR or an issue.

More

• Documentation site — install, reference, agents & MCP, daemon.
• How it works — discovery, renderer, caching, project structure.
• Configuration-only plugin — commit composePreview { } config to your build without pinning the rendering runtime.
• PR review workflow — reusable, preview-gated AI PR review (Codex / Claude / Gemini).
• Development — building plugin, CLI, and extension from source; consuming -SNAPSHOT builds.
• Architecture (contributor) — class-by-class map of the four-stage pipeline.
• Contributor docs index — the full map of the docs/ tree.
• Releases · Changelog · License (Apache 2.0)