Cursor, wildly a popular AI coding startup is rolling out a modern feature that lets people design the look and feel of web applications using artificial intelligence. This tool, the Visual Editor, is essentially a vibration encoding product for designers, giving them access to the same precise controls they would expect from professional design software. In addition to making changes manually, the tool allows you to request changes from Cursor’s AI agent using natural language.
Cursor is best known for its AI coding platform, but with Visual Editor, the startup aims to capture other parts of the software development process. “The core that we care about as professional developers never changes,” Cursor design director Ryo Lu tells WIRED. “But in reality, developers are not alone. They work with many people, and anyone who creates software should be able to find something useful on Cursor.”
Cursor is one of the fastest growing artificial intelligence startups of all time. Since its 2023 debut, the company says it has surpassed $1 billion in recurring revenue and has tens of thousands of companies as customers, including Nvidia, Salesforce and PwC. In November, the startup closed a $2.3 billion funding round, bringing its valuation to almost nearly $30 billion.
Cursor was an early leader in the AI coding market, but is now under more pressure than ever from larger competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. The startup has long licensed AI models from these companies, but now its 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 its release. In response, Cursor began developing and implementing its own artificial intelligence models.
Traditionally, application development required collaboration between many different teams across a wide range of products and tools. By integrating design capabilities directly into its coding environment, Cursor wants to show that it can combine these features into a single platform.
“Before, designers lived in their own world of pixels and frames that weren’t really translated into code. So teams had to create processes to hand off tasks between developers and designers, but there was a lot of friction,” says Lu. “We kind of combined the world of design and coding into one interface with one AI agent.”
Artificial intelligence-based website design
During a demonstration at WIRED headquarters in San Francisco, Cursor product engineering manager Jason Ginsberg showed how the Visual Editor can modify the aesthetics of a website.
The conventional design panel on the right allows users to customize fonts, add buttons, create menus, or change the background. On the left, the chat interface accepts natural language requests such as “set the background color of this button to red.” The cursor agent then applies these changes directly to the code base.
Earlier this year, Cursor released its own web browser that runs directly within the coding environment. The company says the browser provides a better feedback loop during product development, allowing engineers and designers to view requests from real users and access Chrome-style developer tools.