Anysphere’s Cursor AI editor recently added a visual web designer, but the enhancement has drawn mixed reactions from developers who are voicing concerns about bugs, frequent UI changes, and high subscription costs.
Cursor is a fork of Visual Studio Code (VS Code), first released in 2023, customized for AI-assisted software development. Version 2.2, released last week, introduced a bunch of new features.
One of these is debug mode: the developers describes a bug to an AI agent which then instruments code with logging statements in order to verify the likely cause. The agent will then propose a fix and invite the developer to re-test. According to Anysphere, the new mode enables more precise fixes instead of “hundreds of lines of speculative code.”
The most eye-catching new feature is a visual web editor, built into a browser sidebar. Cursor’s web browser can run in a separate window or as an inline pane, and the sidebar now allows page elements to be moved, realigned, sized, colored, and have appearance such as shadows, opacity and borders modified via visual sliders. Developers then click an apply button which triggers an agent to update the code, with hot reload to show the results. Another way to use the visual editor is to select an element and then prompt the AI agent to makes changes.
