Allow skills/agents to return image content inline in chat

Ideas Feature Requests
, ,
1

Feature request for product/service

Chat

Describe the request

MCP tools can return image content that renders inline in the Cursor chat window (via the image content type in the MCP response format). This is really useful for visual feedback — eval result cards, screenshots, diagrams, etc.

However, agent skills (SKILL.md files) have no equivalent capability. Skills can instruct the agent to generate an image file and open it, but there’s no way to display it inline in the chat conversation.

Use case: I built an A/B eval script that compares LLM prompt changes. I wanted to render a clean results table as an image and share it directly in chat (and from there to Slack). The workaround was: write HTML → open in browser via Chrome DevTools MCP → screenshot → open the file in Preview. It works, but it’s clunky compared to how seamlessly MCP tools render images.

Proposal: Allow the agent to return image content inline in chat when instructed by a skill — either by:

  1. Letting the Read tool render images inline when a skill requests it (today it shows in agent context but not in the user-visible chat)

  2. Adding an explicit “show image to user” capability that skills can instruct the agent to use

  3. Extending the GenerateImage tool (or a new ShowImage tool) to accept a file path and display it

This would make skills much more powerful for workflows that involve visual output — eval dashboards, UI screenshots, design comparisons, chart generation, etc.

4

Hi @Robin_Andeer, thanks for the detailed write-up.

We’ve noted the request internally. No timeline to share, but appreciate you laying out the use case and proposed solutions.