View code — the payoff
Why. The last item on the rail turns your model into a technical blueprint — a strong starting point for developers.
How. The View code panel presents your model across tabs: data types, an API, on-screen structure, permissions, processes, agents, and deployment. The toolbar groups three things:
- Check — have an AI review, auto-fix, and test the generated code, and ✨ Polish UI (see below).
- Run app — boot the generated app locally and open it in a new browser tab (see below).
- Export — download just the scaffold, a runnable app with AI-written logic, or the whole Full-Stack project as a zip.
It's scaffolding, not the finished software — a base that developers extend by hand.
✨ Polish UI — an automatic design pass
Click ✨ Polish UI and a senior-designer AI reviews every generated screen against UX best practices in Kiln's design language and proposes improvements: a clear row title, hiding raw ids and technical fields, the right formats (money, dates, badges for statuses), a sensible column selection and form order, and a one-line screen description. It can also switch a screen to a richer layout when the data invites it — KPI tiles (totals/counts) above the list, a card grid, or a kanban board grouped by a status/stage field (great for pipelines like leads, orders, or tickets). It iterates each screen toward the guidelines, then shows you the changes per screen to accept or skip — nothing is applied until you say so. Apply, then Run app or export to see the result. It changes information design (layout data), never code, so it can't break the build. Web research and the interview aside, it runs on your selected engine.
👁 Visual polish goes one step further: it boots the app locally, screenshots each screen, and an
AI critiques what it actually sees — spotting an empty or unbalanced layout, a pipeline that should be a
board, missing KPI tiles — then proposes the same accept/skip improvements. It needs the local service and a
local Chrome/Chromium installed (set KILN_CHROME to point at a specific one); if none is found it says so
rather than failing.
Run app — see the outcome before you export
Click ▶ Run app to actually use the software your model describes, before you commit to it. Kiln starts the generated app on your own machine and opens it in a new tab: a working admin UI with a screen per entity, typed create forms, the actions (commands) you modelled, and a live event log — backed by a real database, so records you create persist and commands fire real events.
This closes the loop: describe → adjust the model → run it → see the result → export. It needs the local service running (you'll see "Server" storage in the sidebar) and Node ≥ 22, and it works fully offline — no account, no cloud, no build step. The preview is a fast, dependency-light stand-in for the polished client in the export; use Export → Full-Stack when you're ready to hand it to developers.
The exported repo carries a complete model.json — every layer of your business as one versionable
document. It's the durable record the generated code (and any regeneration) is built from. Commit it to
git; import it to recall and iterate. See Protecting your fixes.