Chat vs Edit Mode

There are two ways to change your app: describe the change in chat, or point and click with Edit Mode. They are good at different things.

Chat

Chat is the main way you build. You describe what you want, and the agent makes it happen across your whole app. Reach for chat when the change involves behavior, data, new pages, or anything that touches more than one place.

Good uses for chat:

• "Add a checkout step that collects a shipping address."
• "When someone signs up, send them a welcome email."
• "Create an admin page that only I can see."

Edit Mode

Edit Mode is for direct, visual changes with no AI in the loop. It opens a drawer over the chat, and the preview becomes clickable:

• Hover any element and it highlights with a label.
• Click to select it and see its editing controls.
• Double-click any text to edit it in place.

Once an element is selected, the drawer gives you three groups of controls:

• Content. The element's text.
• Type. Text color, size, bold, italic, underline, and alignment.
• Style. Background color, margin, padding, and corner radius.

You also get Undo and Redo (Cmd+Z and Cmd+Shift+Z), Duplicate, and Delete (with a confirm step), and Esc exits. Changes appear instantly in the preview as you make them, and nothing is final until you hit Save.

How Edit Mode saves

Simple style changes are written straight into your app's source with no AI involved, which makes them instant and exact. Your edits snap to your app's design scale where possible, so a color nudge lands on your theme's palette and a size change lands on a clean step, keeping the design consistent. Bigger structural edits, like Duplicate and Delete, are handed to the agent to apply properly, which takes a moment longer and triggers a rebuild.

Which to use

Use Edit Mode when it is quicker to point at the thing than to describe it, and the change is visual: spacing, colors, text, sizes. Use chat for anything that adds features, changes behavior, or spans multiple parts of the app.

Both save into the same app, so you can move between them freely.

Frequently asked

Do Edit Mode changes cost tokens?

Style and text edits are written directly into your app with no AI involved, so they are free. Structural edits that are handed to the agent (Duplicate, Delete) are normal AI changes and cost tokens like a chat request.

Why did my color change snap to a slightly different shade?

Deliberate: edits snap to your app's design scale, so a color lands on your theme's palette and a size lands on a clean step. It keeps one-off tweaks from slowly making the design inconsistent. If you want the exact value, ask for it in chat.

Can I undo an Edit Mode change?

Before saving, Cmd+Z undoes freely and Esc discards. After saving, it is a change like any other, with the usual ways back.

Why can I not edit some things in Edit Mode?

Edit Mode covers an element's content and visual style. Behavior, data, and structure belong to chat, which is the split working as intended: point at what you can see, describe what you cannot.