Cursor, the wild 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 vibration coding product for designers, giving them access to the same fine-grained controls they expect from professional design software. But in addition to making changes manually, the tool offers the ability to request edits from Cursor's AI agent in 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 creation process. “The core of what we care about, professional developers, never changes,” Ryo Lu, Cursor's head of design, tells WIRED. “But in reality, developers are not alone. They work with many people, and anyone who makes software should be able to get something useful out of Cursor.”
Cursor is one of the fastest growing AI startups of all time. Since its debut in 2023, 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, bringing its valuation to nearly $30 billion.
Cursor was an early leader in the AI coding market, but is now facing more pressure than ever from bigger competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The startup has historically 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 launch. In response, Cursor has started developing and deploying its own AI models.
Traditionally, building software applications requires many different teams to work together across a wide range of products and tools. By integrating design capabilities directly into its coding environment, Cursor aims to show that it can bring these functions together in one platform.
“In the past, designers lived in their own world of pixels and frames, and these didn't really translate to code. So teams had to build processes to pass tasks back and forth between developers and designers, but there was a lot of friction,” says Lu. “We have essentially merged the design world and the coding world into one interface with one AI agent.”
AI-powered web design
In a demo at WIRED's San Francisco headquarters, Cursor's head of product engineering, Jason Ginsberg, showed how Visual Editor could change the aesthetics of a web page.
A traditional design panel on the right allows users to customize fonts, add buttons, create menus, or change wallpapers. On the left, a chat interface accepts natural language requests, such as “make the background color of this button red.” Cursor's agent then applies these changes directly to the code base.
Earlier this year, Cursor released its own web browser that works directly within its coding environment. The company claims that 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.
