Cursor Launches an AI Tool to Design Web Interfaces for Designers
Cursor, the rapidly rising AI coding startup, is introducing a new feature that lets users shape the visuals of web applications with AI. The new tool, Visual Editor, acts like a vibe-focused design companion for designers, offering the same granular controls you’d expect from professional design software. In addition to manual tweaks, it enables you to instruct Cursor’s AI agent using natural language to apply changes.
While Cursor is best known for its AI coding platform, Visual Editor marks the company’s move to cover more stages of software creation. “The core group we care about—professional developers—doesn’t change,” says Ryo Lu, Cursor’s head of design. “But in practice, developers aren’t alone. They collaborate with many people, and anyone building software should be able to extract value from Cursor.”
Cursor stands out as one of the fastest-growing AI startups ever. Since its 2023 debut, the company claims to have surpassed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and counts tens of thousands of companies as customers, including Nvidia, Salesforce, and PwC. In November, Cursor completed a $2.3 billion funding round that pushed its valuation to nearly $30 billion.
Cursor helped pioneer AI-driven coding, yet today it faces intensified competition from larger players like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Historically, Cursor licensed AI models from these companies, but rivals are investing heavily in AI coding products of their own. For instance, Anthropic’s Claude Code reached $1 billion in annual recurring revenue just six months after launch. In response, Cursor has started developing and deploying its own AI models.
Traditionally, software development requires multiple teams working across diverse tools. By embedding design capabilities directly into its coding environment, Cursor aims to demonstrate that these functions can coexist in a single platform.
“Designers used to live in a separate world of pixels and frames that didn’t translate directly to code. So teams built handoff processes between designers and developers, but friction persisted,” Lu explains. “We’ve merged design and coding into one interface with one AI agent.”
AI-Powered Web Design
During a WIRED demo at the publication’s San Francisco headquarters, Cursor’s product engineering lead, Jason Ginsberg, showed how Visual Editor could alter a webpage’s aesthetics.
A traditional design panel on the right lets users tweak fonts, add buttons, create menus, and adjust backgrounds. On the left, a chat interface accepts natural-language requests, such as “make this button’s background color red.” Cursor’s AI agent then implements those edits directly in the codebase.
Earlier this year, Cursor released its own web browser integrated into its coding environment. The company argues the browser improves feedback loops during development, allowing engineers and designers to see real-user requests and use Chrome-style developer tools.
Because Visual Editor sits atop Cursor’s browser, users can target any live site—not just their own—and inspect it as if inside the site’s codebase. In one instance, I asked Ginsberg to load WIRED’s homepage.
The tool immediately surfaced the site’s design system: font families, color tokens, and spacing variables defined on the page. Ginsberg could adjust header typography, lighten background colors, or apply a gradient in real time using Cursor’s in-progress-app controls. “It’s all defined on the web,” he notes. “We can show you exactly what the site is built with.”
Ginsberg emphasizes that Cursor respects the unique design language of individual brands. Many web designers are wary of vibe-coding tools today because they often generate generic-looking sites that fail to capture a brand’s distinctive aesthetic. It’s even become a meme that AI-created sites lean into purple gradients and similar tropes.
Fine-grained design controls are at the heart of Cursor’s pitch for Visual Editor. Users can dial in corner radii, adjust letter spacing, or decide whether a menu opens left or right. Unlike traditional design tools that rely on abstract abstractions, Lu says each control maps to actual CSS—the language browsers use to render visuals. This means designers aren’t working with a symbolic stand-in for a UI, but within the real system that ships to users.
Dreaming Big
When asked how Cursor’s Visual Editor stacks up against other vibe-coding tools like Replit and Lovable, Lu dismissed the framing. He argues those competitors primarily target quick demos, not professionals maintaining large codebases. As a result, Cursor views these rivals as parts of a much larger ecosystem.
“We care about people who build software, who have opinions, who have taste, who want to shape things according to their vision, and who deserve tools to act on that vision,” says Roman Ugarte, Cursor’s head of growth. “We might eventually apply something similar for product managers or other roles, but the theme is ambition—raising the ceiling for what people can do, not just making things easier.”
Interest in Cursor’s design tools is already growing, according to Martin Casado, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz who led the firm’s investment in the startup. Casado notes that designers at Spotify are already using Cursor’s tools.
Cursor’s new offering could challenge incumbents like Adobe or Figma, but Casado believes the market is large enough to support multiple approaches as software creation becomes accessible to more roles.
“Cursor is tightly focused on design because it’s tied directly to the codebase,” he says. “With platform shifts, new behaviors will emerge—some will refine old habits, and others will be genuinely new.”
