frictionless

Frictionless

Version: 0.8.0

A dynamic app ecosystem for Claude. Build your own Claude apps or download them:

Build and modify apps while they run. No recompiles. No restarts.

• Quality of life — tame complex tasks with forms and buttons
  • Claude life — UIs for common Claude tasks
  • UNIX life — UIs for UNIX tools
• Life beyond code — expense tracking, habit building, project planning
• Dashboards — surface information at a glance
• Prototype production apps — build functional wireframes at a fraction of the tokens

How It Works

Frictionless uses ui-engine to eliminate complexity that eats 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 to start the frictionless server. The server uses .ui as the default working directory.

Building UIs

Ask Claude to build a UI:

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

Or display an existing app:

/ui show

Standalone Mode

Run frictionless independently for development or testing:

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)

• 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

Installation

Paste this into Claude Code to install:

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

# Add to Claude Code
claude mcp add frictionless -- {home}/.claude/bin/frictionless} mcp

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

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