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’d expect from professional design software. But in addition to making changes manually, the tool lets them request edits from Cursor’s AI agent using natural language.
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. “The core that we care about, professional developers, never changes,” Cursor’s head of design, Ryo Lu, tells WIRED. “But 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.”
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.
Cursor was an early leader in the AI coding market, but it’s 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’s 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.
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.
“Before, 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,” says Lu. “We kind of melded the design world and the coding world together into one interface with one AI agent.”
AI-Powered Web Design
In a demo at WIRED’s San Francisco headquarters, Cursor’s product engineering lead Jason Ginsberg showcased how Visual Editor could modify the aesthetics of a webpage.
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 “make this button’s background color red.” Cursor’s agent then applies those changes directly into the code base.
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.
Because Visual Editor sits on top of Cursor’s browser, users can also point it at any live site—not just their own—and inspect it as if they were inside that site’s code base. At one point, I asked Ginsberg to load up WIRED’s homepage.
Instantly, Cursor surfaced our publication’s 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. “It’s all defined on the web,” Ginsberg says. “We can show you exactly what the site is built with.”
Ginsberg argues that Cursor is trying to respect the “design language” 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’t take a brand’s unique aesthetics into consideration. For example, it’s become a meme that if your website has a purple gradient, it was likely made with AI.
Precise design controls are central to Cursor’s 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—the coding language that tells browsers how to render a page’s visual elements. That means designers aren’t working in a symbolic approximation of a user interface, but within the actual system that ships to users.
Dreaming Big
When asked about how Cursor’s 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.
“We 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,” says Roman Ugarte, Cursor’s head of growth. “We 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—raising the ceiling for what people can do—not just making things easier.”
Demand for Cursor’s design tools is already emerging organically, says Martin Casado, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who led the firm’s investment in the startup. Casado says designers at Spotify, for example, are already using Cursor’s tools.
Cursor’s 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.
“Cursor is really focused on design, as it’s attached directly to the code base,” he says. “With all of these platform shifts, we’ll see new behaviors emerge. Some of that will be an evolution of old behavior, and some will actually be net new.”
The post Cursor Launches an AI Coding Tool For Designers appeared first on Wired.
