Pencil's new AI Pen tool draws vector paths for you to refine
By Steven Van ·
The free-during-early-access design tool adds AI-drawn beziers plus multipoint rotate, scale, and multipath editing.
Tom Krcha, the founder behind Pencil, introduced AI Pen, a new way to draw vector paths inside the pencil.dev canvas. The idea is a genuine split of labor: AI agents draw the vectors, you refine the beziers by hand. The release also brings multipoint rotate, multipoint scale, and multipath editing, and it is available in the app today.
Agents draw the path, you tune the curve
Most AI design tools generate finished-looking artifacts that fall apart the moment you try to edit them. AI Pen takes the opposite approach. An agent can lay down actual vector paths, real anchor points and bezier handles, and then hand them over to you. If the curve is 90 percent right, you drag two handles and it is done. That matters because pen-tool work is one of the most skill-gated parts of design: plenty of people can pick colors and arrange layouts, far fewer can draw a clean bezier icon from scratch. Letting an agent produce the raw geometry while keeping full manual control is the practical middle ground.
The supporting features round out serious vector editing. Multipoint rotate and scale let you select several anchor points and transform them together, and multipath editing means you can work across multiple paths at once instead of tediously editing shapes one at a time. These are the kinds of unglamorous capabilities that decide whether a tool can replace your existing vector editor for real work.
Why this fits Pencil's whole thesis
Pencil is not a typical design app. It is an MCP-driven vector canvas built around open design files, in a documented .pen format that is just JSON, living directly in your codebase and IDE under version control. AI agents get full read and write access to the canvas through a local MCP server, which is how Krcha has shown demos of up to six agents designing an app together on one canvas. Krcha previously built Around, the videochat startup acquired by Miro, and Pencil is backed by a16z Speedrun.
Seen through that lens, AI Pen is the missing primitive. Agents could already compose layouts, components, and flows in Pencil. Now they can draw: icons, illustrations, custom shapes, the freeform vector work that previously had to be imported from elsewhere. It closes a loop where a coding agent can request an icon, a design agent can draw it, and a human can polish the curves, all in a file that lives in the repo.
Getting it
AI Pen and the new multipoint and multipath editing tools are in the current build, available to download now at pencil.dev. Pencil launched publicly in early 2026 and has been free during its early access period, so the cost of trying agent-drawn vectors on your own projects is essentially zero. If you have been curious whether AI can handle real vector work rather than just generating pictures of it, this is the most direct way to find out.