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.

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.

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!