It was a cold January morning, and my partner (who I'm fortunate enough to work with) was driving us both to the Virgin Media O2 Manchester office.
Half asleep whilst scrolling through my phone I get that oh-so familiar beep of an email landing in my inbox.
I think I let out a little whelp of excitement when I saw the cause, as a few weeks before I'd put myself on the waiting list for Pencil.
Hello designers, vibecoders and builders!
Excited to launch PENCIL! An infinite design canvas for Claude Code & Cursor.
Available for everyone to download today.
Finally agentic UX / UI design I thought to myself. A very long 20 minute commute later I finally arrived at the office, foregoing my usual coffee ritual and rushing to find a spare desk.
I opened up Cursor, quickly found the Pencil plugin, installed it, and got started experimenting to see what I could do.
Largely due to a conversation the previous night with Stefan, the first thing that came to mind was a Chat Bot if Apple had never moved away from Skeumorphism.
A few flashes of purple on my screen, and probably a few pounds in token spend and we're done... I've got my SkeumorphicGPT design ready to never be built - Skeumorphism can stay with the iPhone 3GS thank you very much.
This could not have been easier!
In my excitement I then jumped into downloading the full Pencil app.
I was curious, as Cursor has a lot of prompt injection and context to steer the LLMs into coding, what would Pencil be like without that?... and of course with the power of Claude!
So off I went putting in the exact same prompt as I'd given Cursor.
Those purple flashes I mentioned earlier swished across my screen (these are when the LLM is interacting with a region within Pencil but honestly it might as well be magic) and another SkeumorphicGPT app had apparated infront of me.
Examining this one, it's certaily more iPhone 5 than iPhone 3GS, but still has solid Skeumorphism and it's done a great job - I think I liked this one better.
Both App and Plugin work in pretty much the same way, I can interact, the LLM can interact, we can both interact at the same time - it's truly incredible.
For those who see the images above and say "Claude Sonnet 4.6 wasnt available in January" or "Pencil didnt have that button then" ... I've only just generated these images.
I'd been far too excited that morning to stop and grab screenshots.
Since this rushed and hurried experiment, Pencil has only gotten better.
In the early days, Cursor would sometimes examine the contents of our .pen files as JSON objects and try and edit them, foresaking the MCP - it's been a few months now and I've not seen it for a while.
Pencil has added features in the App which allow you to run multiple Agents in parallel - we've seen how it works for Agent Teams... it works just as well for Pencil.
It's also really improved the adherence of code generation to design, even vs the Figma MCP.
I think part of the reason this works so well is:
The JSON inside the .pen code gets indexed by Cursor
The Pencil MCP has high quality tools, some that return technical information, some that return screenshots
The design layout seems to resemble flex box, it's a lot like Figma's auto layout... but it fits a little more comfortably to my engineering brain
It's become part of my daily engineering world, even this site was desiged in Pencil!
It's been a good few months since Pencil came out, and Figma are always going to have the person-power to move quicker.
However there are a few things I've come to really appreciate about Pencil:
Import from Figma
Design files being stored in the codebase
Design Kits
In the office, the word has spread! I've seen Product Owners, Software Engineers, and QA Engineers using it.
The only people I havent seen use it are designers, and that's not really a surprise as the only downside so far is that it requires a lot of up-front effort designing your brand as Pencil Components for it to build a brand compliant design.
But if you need something fast, Pencil's your bot!