DIVE vs Airship

Airship is a local reverse proxy that puts an infinite design canvas with real viewports in front of your dev server and lets an agent edit the source.

Airship and DIVE disagree about where the editor should live. Airship says: run `npx @airshiplabs/cli --target 3000`, open the canvas on localhost:3001, select an element, and the agent resolves it back to file and line and edits the source. DIVE says: the page you already have open is the canvas, whichever origin it is on, and the extension streams what you changed to the agent over MCP.

Pick DIVE when

You need to edit a staging or production page, or any site you don't run locally, Airship is localhost-only.
You want to share a session or stream edits to an agent on another machine (Cloud mode).
You want the native browser, DevTools and extensions you already use rather than a proxied canvas.
Your agent is not Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode, DIVE speaks MCP to any client.

Pick Airship when

You want side-by-side real viewports (desktop, tablet, mobile) of the same local app.
You want the tool to map a selection straight to a source file and line.
You want built-in per-file revert without Git and a safe mode that blocks destructive agent commands.
You value a fully local, no-account, no-telemetry setup.

Feature	DIVE	Airship
Visual editing on a scriptable webpage	Yes, typography, colour, layout, spacing, motion and effects on localhost, staging or production pages the extension can script. Browser-protected pages are excluded.	Yes, on your own local dev server only, the canvas proxies localhost and resolves selections to source
MCP (Model Context Protocol) handoff to AI agents	Yes, Cloud, Local, and Self-hosted modes; eight common session tools, plus Local feedback rounds	No MCP, drives Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode directly from the canvas
Persistent change history (Changes tab)	Yes, searchable, filterable, exportable	Keeps the previous version of each edited file for instant revert; no searchable edit log documented
Open source	Yes (MIT)	CLI is published under MIT on npm (@airshiplabs/cli 0.3.0, August 2026); repository at github.com/0xnyn/airship
Price	Free MIT-licensed extension	Free; no account or hosted service
Markdown / JSON export of the diff	Yes	Not documented, edits land directly in source
Best fit for	Designers, developers, QA, PMs, content, indie hackers, agencies, vibe coders	Developers iterating on a local React/Next/Vite app with a terminal agent

The honest take

Airship's multi-viewport canvas and file:line resolution are things DIVE does not do, and 'edit the source, revert the file' is a tighter loop than a diff handoff when everything is on one laptop. DIVE's case is reach: it works on pages you don't host, in three browsers, and with any MCP client, and it keeps a persistent record of what changed.

How we checked

Checked on 11 October 2026. Documentation review of the Airship homepage, how-it-works and FAQ sections, plus the @airshiplabs/cli npm registry entry for version and licence. The CLI was not run and no agent edit was tested. Capability claims are vendor-documented, not independently runtime-verified.