I’m opening this thread because we need to talk about a missing piece of the Cursor puzzle. We want the Design Sidebar back.
Currently, there is a massive gap between what we had and what we have now:
-
Old Cursor (Design Sidebar): A true visual-first workflow. You could modify your site directly with real-time property-editing controls.
-
Current Cursor (Design Mode): It’s now just a selection tool. You can select elements to talk about them with the agent, but you can’t tweak them yourself visually.
Why the Agent isn’t enough (The “Look Before You Leap” factor):
The best part of the old sidebar was the ability to experiment. You could tweak margins, colors, or fonts to see if they actually looked good before committing them to your codebase.
With the new Agent-only mode:
-
You have to prompt for every tiny change.
-
The Agent immediately changes your files.
-
If it looks bad, you have to undo or prompt again.
The old sidebar gave us instant visual feedback without the overhead of generating new code for every small test. It was faster, more intuitive, and gave us total control.
The Request:
Don’t just give us a selection tool for the Agent. Bring back the direct property-editing controls. Let us design, experiment, and code simultaneously again.
Who else is missing the visual controls? Let’s get this back on the roadmap! 