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.
