cursor, wildy A popular AI coding startup is releasing a new feature that lets you design the look and feel of your web applications using AI. This tool, Visual Editor, is essentially a vibecoding product for designers, giving them access to the same fine-grained controls they've come to expect from professional design software. However, with this tool, you can not only make manual changes, but also use natural language to request edits from Cursor's AI agent.
Cursor is best known for its AI coding platform, but the startup wants to use its Visual Editor to capture other parts of the software creation process. “Our core values of professional developers will never change,” Ryo Lu, head of design at Cursor, told WIRED. “But in reality, developers are not alone. They collaborate with many people, and anyone who writes software should find something useful in Cursor.”
Cursor is one of the fastest growing AI startups in history. The company says it has generated more than $1 billion in annual recurring revenue since its debut in 2023 and counts tens of thousands of companies as customers, including Nvidia, Salesforce, and PwC. In November, the startup closed a $2.3 billion funding round, valuing it at nearly $30 billion.
Cursor was an early leader in the AI coding market, but is now under more pressure than ever from major competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The company has traditionally licensed AI models from these companies, but now rivals are investing heavily in their own AI coding products. For example, Anthropic's Claude Code grew even faster than Cursor, reaching $1 billion in annual recurring revenue just six months after launch. In response, Cursor began developing and deploying its own AI models.
Traditionally, building software applications has required many different teams working together across different products and tools. By integrating design capabilities directly into the coding environment, Cursor wants to demonstrate that these capabilities can be integrated into one platform.
“Before, designers lived in their own world of pixels and frames that didn't really translate into code. So teams had to build processes to pass tasks back and forth between developers and designers, and there was a lot of friction,” Lu says. “We kind of merge the world of design and the world of coding into one interface with one AI agent.”
AI-powered web design
In a demo at WIRED's San Francisco headquarters, Jason Ginsberg, head of product engineering at Cursor, showed how you can change the aesthetics of your web pages with the visual editor.
The classic design panel on the right lets you adjust fonts, add buttons, create menus, and change the background. The chat interface on the left accepts natural language requests such as “Make this button's background color red.” The cursor agent then applies those changes directly to the code base.
Earlier this year, Cursor released its own web browser that works directly within your coding environment. The company claims the browser creates a better feedback loop during product development, allowing engineers and designers to see requests from real users and access Chrome-style developer tools.
