Sketch Your App Screen, Let AI Build It

What it is

Imagine sketching an app on a napkin, except the napkin already knows what a real button looks like. M3E Canvas is a free tool that runs in your browser. You drag real app pieces onto a phone or desktop screen: buttons, top bars, navigation bars, cards, pop-up dialogs, text fields. Then you link the screens together, so tapping 'Book a table' takes you to the booking page, and you can click through the whole flow as if it were a real app.

When it feels right, you copy a plain-language description of what you built and hand it to an AI coding tool like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or Gemini CLI. You're no longer describing your idea in a long, wobbly paragraph. You're showing the AI a clear picture.

Why it caught our eye

A lot of the friction between a founder and whoever builds the app comes down to 'that's not what I meant.' This closes some of that gap before anything gets built.

It's also refreshingly simple. No account, no server. Your designs are saved in your own browser. There's an optional AI helper, but you plug in your own key from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or DeepSeek. The maker, lnkiai, called it a project by an unknown student when it passed 2k stars on GitHub. It now sits at about 8.7k, and the README says it's free and will stay that way.

Words worth knowing

• Material 3 Expressive: a design system from Google, a shared look and feel for buttons, menus and cards in apps.
• Prompt: the instructions you give an AI. A clearer picture in, a better result out.
• Open source (MIT license): the code is public, and anyone is free to use it and build on it.
• Local storage: a little drawer inside your browser where the tool keeps your work, on your own computer.

Try it

If an app idea has been living in your head for a while, sketch three screens this week and see what it looks like outside your head: github.com/lnkiai/m3e-canvas