prompt-to-asset

Details + quotas: Free paths beyond Pollinations. Run p2a doctor or ask your assistant for asset_doctor() to see what's live right now.

[!TIP] Stuck? Click Install in Cursor or Install in VS Code above, restart the editor, and say: "make a favicon for my app, dark-mode aware."

Highlights

• Free CLI-first generation — p2a doctor, p2a pick, and the MCP tools rank free API routes before paid models, so developers can generate inside the CLI without enabling billing.
• Three execution modes — inline_svg (host LLM authors SVG), external_prompt_only (paste into any web UI), api (server calls a free or paid provider). Pick what fits. All three can finish on $0.
• 60+ models, free-first routing — Cloudflare Workers AI, NVIDIA NIM, HF, Horde, Pollinations, free trials, plus optional paid OpenAI / Ideogram / Recraft / BFL / Gemini. Each rule cites a research source.
• Refuses to do the wrong thing — the Never column. No wordmarks past 3 words through a diffusion sampler. No transparent PNG through Imagen. No negative_prompt on Flux.
• Offline platform fan-out — one 1024² master → iOS AppIconSet, Android adaptive + monochrome, PWA 192/512/512-maskable, favicon bundle, visionOS parallax, Flutter launcher. Zero network.
• Validates before shipping — tier-0 checks on every output: dims, alpha presence, checkerboard FFT, safe-zone bbox, ΔE2000 palette drift, WCAG contrast, OCR Levenshtein on wordmarks.
• Sprite sheets + 9-slice — pack PNG frames into TexturePacker-compatible atlases (Phaser, PixiJS, Godot, Unity); emit 9-slice numbers + CSS border-image + Android .9.png.

Table of contents

• 30-second start
• Usage — what to say to your assistant
• The three modes — inline_svg · external_prompt_only · api
• The router — which model for which job, and what never
• Free paths beyond Pollinations
• Install
• Models covered — 60+
• MCP tools — 25 tools
• CLI surface
• Brand bundle (brand.json)
• Platform support
• Architecture
• Comparison
• Security
• Research-backed decisions
• Development
• Community · License

Usage

You just talk to your assistant. Example from a new chat:

Make me a transparent logo for a developer-tools company called Forge. Flat vector, two-tone warm orange on neutral.

Behind the scenes:

1. asset_doctor() — check what modes and providers are live.
2. asset_init_brand({ app_name: "Forge", palette: ["#EA580C", "#F5F5F4"] }) if no brand.json exists.
3. asset_enhance_prompt({ brief }) returns an AssetSpec: classification, rewritten prompt, modes_available[], optional svg_brief, optional paste_targets, and a routing_trace pointing at the research file that backed the decision (plus never_models — why Imagen or DALL·E got rejected).
4. Assistant offers you inline_svg / external_prompt_only / api.
5. If inline_svg: it writes <svg> inline and calls asset_save_inline_svg → writes master.svg, favicon.ico, apple-touch, AppIconSet, PWA bundle to disk.
6. If external_prompt_only: assistant shows the refined prompt and the best paste target (free first). You generate, save, then say "ingest this file" → asset_ingest_external.
7. If api: assistant calls the routed provider. Server mattes, vectorizes, exports, validates.
8. Follow-up: "also fan this out for iOS and Android" → asset_export_bundle with the saved master.

Zero CLI typing. The CLI is still first-class for CI, shell scripts, and non-MCP environments — both surfaces hit the same core.

Why this exists

Two facts shape everything here.

Producing production-grade software assets is a routing and post-processing problem, not a prompt-engineering problem.

Imagen 3/4 and Gemini Flash Image can't produce real RGBA PNGs — their VAE is RGB-only, so asking for a transparent background renders the grey-and-white checkerboard as pixels. SDXL can't spell past ~8 characters. Only Recraft emits native SVG. Flux errors on negative_prompt. None of that is visible in the model UI. All of it silently breaks one-shot "prompt → asset" tools.

You may not have an image-model API key. The plugin works anyway.

Every one of the three modes can finish on $0.

The three modes

flowchart LR
    A["one-line brief"] --> B["asset_enhance_prompt"]
    B --> C{"mode"}
    C -->|inline_svg| D["Host LLM emits SVG inline<br/>→ asset_save_inline_svg"]
    C -->|external_prompt_only| E["Paste into web UI<br/>→ asset_ingest_external"]
    C -->|api| F["Server calls routed provider"]
    D --> G["matte · vectorize · validate"]
    E --> G
    F --> G
    G --> H["AssetBundle<br/>ios · android · pwa · favicon · visionos · flutter"]

| Mode | Key? | What happens | Best for | | -------------------------- | -------- | -----------------------------------------------