Cursor Design Mode adds Annotate: point, draw and edit text on your running app to send visual prompts to agents

Background and pain point

When refining a UI, the hard part is often not the code but describing in words that this spacing is too big or that button should line up with its neighbor. With text-only prompts the agent has to guess which component and which style rule you mean, and it can take several rounds. On Oct 27 Cursor announced on its official X account that Design Mode now has Annotate, making pointing at the page a first-class way to prompt.

Architecture

According to the official docs, Design Mode runs in the browser inside the Agents Window on your running app. You click an element (arrow keys move to its parent or child), Shift-click to select several, drag to box an area and mark it up with draw, ellipse, rectangle and arrow tools, double-click to edit text in place, open a CSS inspector to change properties, or dictate a note by voice. Each note carries the element tag, id, classes, selector path, the first 200 characters of visible text, size and position, six computed styles and a cropped screenshot. In React, Vue and Svelte apps it also includes the component name and component stack so the agent can go straight to the source.

Benchmarks

This is an interaction feature and Cursor has not published any speed or accuracy numbers, so we do not speculate. The post says you can review designs at different screen sizes; the docs did not describe that part separately this round. The post passed 1,100 likes within about an hour.

Getting started

Update to Cursor 3.24.18 or later, open the browser in the Agents Window and click Annotate in the toolbar or press Cmd+Shift+D. Batch edits starts off, so Return sends a single note to the agent right away; turn it on to collect numbered pins and send a round at once. Cmd+L puts a note into the chat input, and Option-click adds an element straight to the chat. With hot reload, changes appear in the running app as the agent finishes. Cursor recommends a fast model that is strong at interface work, such as Composer 2.5.