frictionless

Frictionless

Version: 0.14.0

An app ecosystem for Claude. Share the love—or steal it.

Chat with Claude, get fully hot-loadable apps. Lua backend, HTML templates. No recompiles. No restarts.

And your apps can even integrate with Claude: your apps poke Claude and Claude pokes back. Right in the state.

Apps for

• Quality of life — tame complex tasks with forms and buttons
  • Claude Code life — point, click, Claude makes it so
  • UNIX life — UIs for UNIX tools
• Life beyond Claude Code — expenses, habits, projects, whatever
• Dashboards — surface info at a glance
• Prototypes — functional wireframes at a fraction of the tokens

What does "fully" hot-loadable mean?

• Both front-end changes and backend changes are hot-loadable.
• All your state is in the backend and hotloading preserves it.
• You rename a field of a prototype, all its instances' fields get renamed.
• Yeah even structural changes to your data. That's what fully hot-loadable means.

How It Works

Built on ui-engine. Less complexity → fewer tokens:

• No API layer — no endpoints, no serialization, no DTOs
• No frontend code — just HTML templates with declarative bindings
• No sync wiring — change backend data, UI updates automatically—no code to detect or push changes

Claude writes your app logic and skips everything else. See overview for details.

Usage

Once installed, use /ui show to show the Frictionless console. You can build apps in the console.

Frictionless uses your project's .ui directory for its apps and content.

Building UIs in the CLI

Ask Claude to build a UI:

/ui-thorough make a contacts app with search and inline editing

Or display an existing app:

/ui show contacts

Standalone Mode

Run frictionless independently for development or testing changes to Frictionless itself:

frictionless serve --port 8000 --mcp-port 8001
frictionless serve --port 8000 --mcp-port 8001 --dir /path/to/ui-dir

The --dir option specifies the working directory for Lua scripts, viewdefs, and apps. Defaults to .ui. The --mcp-port is only needed if you want to connect it to Claude.

Bundling

Create custom binaries with your site embedded:

frictionless bundle site/ -o my-ui-dir   # Create bundled binary
frictionless ls                          # List bundled files
frictionless cat index.html              # Show file contents
frictionless cp '*.lua' scripts/         # Copy matching files
frictionless extract output/             # Extract all bundled files to current directory

Documentation (in .ui by default)

• Intro — Introduction and overview
• Platform Reference — Architecture, tools, and quick start guide
• Viewdef Syntax — HTML template bindings (ui-* attributes)
• Lua API — Class patterns and globals
• Agent Workflow — Best practices for AI agents
• Themes — Theme switching and customization

Installation

Tell Claude:

Install using github zot/frictionless readme

To install manually:

# Download (replace OS/ARCH: linux-amd64, linux-arm64, darwin-amd64, darwin-arm64, windows-amd64)
mkdir -p {home}/.claude/bin
curl -L https://github.com/zot/frictionless/releases/latest/download/frictionless-linux-amd64 -o {home}/.claude/bin/frictionless
chmod +x {home}/.claude/bin/frictionless

cd {your-project}

# Add Frictionless to your project
claude mcp add frictionless -- {home}/.claude/bin/frictionless} mcp

# Initialize the project
{home}/.claude/bin/frictionless} install

# Add the playwright MCP server to your project for better debugging
claude mcp add playwright -- npx @playwright/mcp@latest

Future Directions

App Permissions

Lua apps have filesystem access via io.open, which allows reading files without Claude Code permission prompts. While convenient, this could be misused to explore directories the user hasn't explicitly shared.

Planned guardrails:

• Apps declare required permissions in a manifest (e.g., app.json)
• Permissions scoped to specific paths: .claude/, project root, etc.
• User approves permissions on first run
• Sandbox enforcement in the Lua environment