Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story<\/p>\n
Cursor, the wildly popular AI coding startup, is launching a new feature that lets people design the look and feel of web applications with AI. The tool, Visual Editor, is essentially a vibe-coding product for designers, giving them access to the same fine-grained controls they\u2019d expect from professional design software. But in addition to making changes manually, the tool lets them request edits from Cursor\u2019s AI agent using natural language.<\/p>\n
Cursor is best known for its AI coding platform, but with Visual Editor, the startup wants to capture other parts of the software creation process. \u201cThe core that we care about, professional developers, never changes,\u201d Cursor\u2019s head of design, Ryo Lu, tells WIRED. \u201cBut in reality, developers are not by themselves. They work with a lot of people, and anyone making software should be able to find something useful out of Cursor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cursor is one of the fastest growing AI startups of all time. Since its 2023 debut, the company says it has surpassed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and counts tens of thousands of companies, including Nvidia, Salesforce, and PwC, as customers. In November, the startup closed a $2.3 billion funding round that brought its valuation to nearly $30 billion.<\/p>\n
Cursor was an early leader in the AI coding market, but it\u2019s now facing more pressure than ever from larger competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The startup has historically licensed AI models from these companies, but now its rivals are investing heavily in AI coding products of their own. Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code, for example, grew even faster than Cursor, reaching $1 billion in annual recurring revenue just six months after launch. In response, Cursor has started developing and deploying its own AI models.<\/p>\n
Traditionally, building software applications has required many different teams working together across a wide range of products and tools. By integrating design capabilities directly into its coding environment, Cursor wants to show that it can bring these functions together into a single platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore, designers used to live in their own world of pixels and frames, and they don't really translate to code. So teams had to build processes to hand off tasks back and forth between developers and designers, but there was a lot of friction,\u201d says Lu. \u201cWe kind of melded the design world and the coding world together into one interface with one AI agent.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a demo at WIRED\u2019s San Francisco headquarters, Cursor\u2019s product engineering lead Jason Ginsberg showcased how Visual Editor could modify the aesthetics of a webpage.<\/p>\n
A traditional design panel on the right lets users adjust fonts, add buttons, create menus, or change backgrounds. On the left, a chat interface accepts natural-language requests, such as \u201cmake this button\u2019s background color red.\u201d Cursor\u2019s agent then applies those changes directly into the code base.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, Cursor released its own web browser that works directly within its coding environment. The company argues the browser creates a better feedback loop when developing products, allowing engineers and designers to view requests from real users and access Chrome-style developer tools.<\/p>\n
Because Visual Editor sits on top of Cursor's browser, users can also point it at any live site\u2014not just their own\u2014and inspect it as if they were inside that site\u2019s code base. At one point, I asked Ginsberg to load up WIRED\u2019s homepage.<\/p>\n
Instantly, Cursor surfaced our publication\u2019s design system: every font family, color token, and spacing variable defined on the page. Ginsberg could tweak the header typography, lighten background colors, or apply a gradient in real time using the same controls Cursor offers for in-progress apps. \u201cIt\u2019s all defined on the web,\u201d Ginsberg says. \u201cWe can show you exactly what the site is built with.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ginsberg argues that Cursor is trying to respect the \u201cdesign language\u201d of different companies. Many web designers, he says, are skeptical of vibe-coding apps on the market today, because they tend to produce generic-looking websites that don\u2019t take a brand\u2019s unique aesthetics into consideration. For example, it\u2019s become a meme that if your website has a purple gradient, it was likely made with AI.<\/p>\n
Precise design controls are central to Cursor\u2019s pitch for its Visual Editor. Users can fine-tune corner radii, adjust letter spacing, or change whether a menu opens to the left or right. Unlike traditional design tools that rely on their own abstractions, Lu says every control maps to real CSS\u2014the coding language that tells browsers how to render a page\u2019s visual elements. That means designers aren\u2019t working in a symbolic approximation of a user interface, but within the actual system that ships to users.<\/p>\n
When asked about how Cursor\u2019s Visual Editor compares to other vibe-coding apps, such as Replit and Lovable, Lu rejected the framing altogether. He argues that those companies primarily target users building quick demos, not professionals working in large code bases. For that reason, Cursor views its competitors as much larger software providers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe care about people who are software builders, who are opinionated, who have taste, who have strong opinions about how things should be, and giving them the tools to act on that vision,\u201d says Roman Ugarte, Cursor\u2019s head of growth. \u201cWe might do a similar thing in the future for product managers. We might do a similar thing in the future for other roles, but I think the theme is ambition\u2014raising the ceiling for what people can do\u2014not just making things easier.\u201d<\/p>\n
Demand for Cursor\u2019s design tools is already emerging organically, says Martin Casado, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who led the firm\u2019s investment in the startup. Casado says designers at Shopify, for example, are already using Cursor\u2019s tools.<\/p>\n
Cursor\u2019s new offering could pose a challenge to incumbents like Adobe or Figma, but Casado says the market is large enough to support multiple approaches as software creation becomes accessible to people working in more types of roles.<\/p>\n
\u201cCursor is really focused on design, as it\u2019s attached directly to the code base,\u201d he says. \u201cWith all of these platform shifts, we\u2019ll see new behaviors emerge. Some of that will be an evolution of old behavior, and some will actually be net new.\u201d<\/p>\n
Update: 12\/11\/2025, 1 PM EDT: WIRED has clarified a quote from Martin Casado, who, following the publication of this article, updated that he meant Shopify \u2014 and not Spotify \u2014 designers are using Cursor.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story Cursor, the wildly popular AI coding startup, is launching a new feature that lets people design the look and feel of web applications with AI. The tool, Visual Editor, is essentially a vibe-coding product for designers, giving them access to the same fine-grained controls they\u2019d expect from professional […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40613,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-40612","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}