---
title: "Canvas Design Mode and Context Usage Report"
description: "Cursor’s canvas release adds Design Mode, enabling users to select and annotate UI elements directly while guiding edits. The update also turns agent context usage into an interactive canvas report, breaking token consumption across the system prompt, tool definitions, rules, skills, and more. Because the report is interactive, users can ask follow-up questions, customize its answers, or use an embedded Debug with Agent button to seek opportunities to reduce context usage in a new conversation. Other changes include full-screen browser access for shared canvases, prompt-triggering buttons, improved handling of canvas type errors, better component styling, and more chart customization options."
---

# Canvas Design Mode and Context Usage Report

[Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor) · Jun 4, 2026

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

Cursor’s canvas release adds Design Mode, enabling users to select and annotate UI elements directly while guiding edits. The update also turns agent context usage into an interactive canvas report, breaking token consumption across the system prompt, tool definitions, rules, skills, and more. Because the report is interactive, users can ask follow-up questions, customize its answers, or use an embedded Debug with Agent button to seek opportunities to reduce context usage in a new conversation. Other changes include full-screen browser access for shared canvases, prompt-triggering buttons, improved handling of canvas type errors, better component styling, and more chart customization options.

## Context

The release focuses on faster canvas editing and better visibility into how agent context is used. It also adds sharing, interaction, reliability, styling, and charting improvements for canvases.

## Approach / What changed

Design Mode lets users select and annotate canvas UI elements to guide edits. Context Explorer presents token usage as an interactive canvas report covering the system prompt, tool definitions, rules, skills, and other areas; users can ask follow-up questions, customize the report, or start a new debugging conversation from its embedded button.

## Takeaways

- Design Mode supports direct selection and annotation of canvas UI elements, replacing text-only descriptions for iterative edits.
- The context explorer reports token allocation across system prompts, tool definitions, rules, skills, and more, while allowing follow-up questions and customization.
- Shared canvases can open full-screen in a browser, and agents can embed buttons that run specific prompts when clicked.

## FAQ

### How can users guide canvas edits without describing every change in text?

Design Mode lets users select and annotate UI elements directly in a canvas. They can point to an element, provide feedback, and iterate on the edit.

### What does the context usage report show?

The interactive report breaks down where tokens go across the system prompt, tool definitions, rules, skills, and more. Users can ask follow-up questions and customize the report.

### How does the release help reduce context usage?

The canvas includes a Debug with Agent button. Clicking it asks Cursor to identify opportunities to reduce context usage in a new conversation.

**Tags:** [AI Agents](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai-agents), [Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/topic/cursor), [Observability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/observability)

- Source: [Cursor](https://cursor.com/changelog/canvas-improvements)
- Source URL: https://cursor.com/changelog/canvas-improvements
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-19T10:36:14.320Z

[Read original post](https://cursor.com/changelog/canvas-improvements)