PixilUI and shadcn/ui

What shadcn/ui is good at

• The base layer of an app: button, dialog, form fields, tables, menus and the rest, styled with Tailwind.
• Source in your repo instead of a package you override, so changing a component means editing its file.
• The CLI and the registry format. Any library can publish a registry the CLI installs from, which is how PixilUI installs.
• AI Elements now lives in its docs: chat, message, prompt input, tool, reasoning, confirmation, plan, queue and more, as compositions of shadcn/ui components.

What PixilUI adds

• AI product parts with every state designed: an approval card with a risk level that folds into a receipt, a run timeline with a waiting step, a tool call row with a live timer and its JSON one click away.
• Motion as part of each item: springs and durations come from one set of tokens, and every animation has a reduced-motion branch.
• Pages written for agents as well as people: each item has a markdown twin, and llms.txt, llms-small.txt and llms-full.txt are generated from the same metadata.
• Notes on when not to use each item, on its page, so you and your coding agent can pick the right one.

Install

shadcn/ui

PixilUI, after adding the registry to components.json (installation)

Using both

Use both. PixilUI is a shadcn registry, so its items install with the same CLI into components/pixilui, next to your shadcn/ui components. Each item brings its own tokens and motion presets through @pixilui/foundation instead of reading shadcn/ui's theme variables.

Sources

Read on 27 October 2026. If something here no longer matches shadcn/ui's site, write to hello@pixilui.com and we will fix it.

• shadcn/ui introduction
• AI Elements in shadcn/ui
• shadcn CLI