Allow disabling automatic screenshots in Design mode for non-multimodal models

Ideas Feature Requests
1

Feature request for product/service

Cursor IDE

Describe the request

Problem

In Design Mode, Cursor automatically attaches a screenshot every time a message is sent.

This works well for multimodal models, but it causes problems when using custom API providers or text-only models that do not support image input. In these cases, every request fails because an image is always included.

Suggested Improvement

Please add an option such as:

  • Automatically attach screenshots in Design Mode (On/Off)

or

  • Attach screenshots only when explicitly requested

This would allow users to choose whether screenshots are sent automatically.

Why this matters

Many users use custom OpenAI-compatible APIs or self-hosted models. Some of these models are text-only, while others charge extra for image input.

Giving users control over automatic screenshots would:

  • Improve compatibility with non-multimodal models.
  • Reduce unnecessary image uploads and token usage.
  • Make Design Mode more flexible for different AI providers.
  • Prevent failed requests when using text-only models.

This small setting would greatly improve the experience for users who rely on custom APIs.

5

Hey, thanks for the feature request. It’s detailed and clear.

Right now, Design Mode always attaches a screenshot when you send a message. That’s part of how the mode works, since visual context is the whole point. There isn’t a separate option yet to disable auto-attach or to only send an image when requested.

A toggle for text-only or non-multimodal models and BYOK makes sense. I’ll leave the thread open so others can vote and add their use cases. The more votes and concrete details we get, the more likely it is to get picked up. I can’t share an ETA yet.

If this is about BYOK or a custom endpoint breaking on image input, check the related threads that focus on that side of the issue: [Bug] Images/vision completely broken with OpenAI BYOK + custom endpoint override (Unauthorized error) and GPT-5.5 BYOK not working.