2025: The Year We Stopped Building UI by Hand

In 2019 when I started Candu, I couldn’t figure out why engineers were still coding buttons. In 2025, we started to ask: why would anyone? 

As engineering teams lean into faster and faster development with tools like Cursor, product experiences are going to need to fundamentally transform to keep up. 

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‍The Jump: From Drag-and-Drop to Prompt-and-Refine

Twelve months ago, if you wanted to build an upgrade banner, you'd spend a couple hours in our editor. Today? You describe it or attach a screenshot, and our AI builds it in seconds. We’re not making a bet that AI will get you all the way there. You’ll still want to finesse in our drag-and-drop Editor. The bet is that they could dance together.

What we shipped:

• Prompt-to-Design: Tell Candu what you want—a modal, checklist, banner, or entire dashboard—and watch it materialize. Not a template. Not a suggestion. The actual, production-ready component.
• Image Generation: Remember when AI-generated images had 6 fingers? In November 2024, our first attempt was cool but weird. Today, it's production-ready for icons and assets, and you can actually iterate on them.
• The Interoperable Editor: Start with AI, refine with drag-and-drop, jump back to prompting. It's not AI or human—it's both, whenever you need them. Instead of generating code, which most of our users (like me) can’t read, you can edit the document with our drag-and-drop editor. 
• Context-Aware Creation: Our AI doesn't build in a vacuum. It sees your actual product through snapshots, placing content exactly where users need it.
• Instant Iterations: "Make it dark mode." "Translate to French." "Optimize for mobile." Each command takes a few seconds, not sprints.

The technical leap? Reasoning models coupled with tooling calls. It’s the difference from here’s an LLM spitting out some gobbledegook text to "I understand what your intent, let me spin up a production-ready mock.” 

A Different Kind of Growth Story

While building this future, we also hit a big milestone for us: Candu reached profitability.

Not by cutting corners, but by focusing on what we do best: enabling our customers to build and iterate on UX that doesn’t just look beautiful, they create value. This discipline means we innovate from strength, and have the time to build products we want to see built (and take some bigger leaps).

The foundations we laid:

• Enterprise-ready with Company-level traits
• Deep Salesforce and HubSpot integrations
• Infrastructure that scales without breaking the bank

The Ideas That Shaped Our Thinking

This year's breakthroughs came from watching how the best teams actually work:

Our most-read insights:

• How Lovable pioneered agentic onboarding (the company that opened pandora’s box of what vibecoding could do) and our profile of Airtable’s new agentic onboarding. 
• Why growth teams are becoming "squads of one"
• How Moz got 8 out of 10 users to love onboarding

The pattern? AI isn’t just changing how quickly we can build a banner, it’s fundamentally reshaping our ambition for what we can build, and for what a savvy operator can achieve with the right tools and imagination.

What's Next: We’re Going to Kill Manual Product Tours

Here's what we haven't talked about yet: everything we've built has been preparing for one launch.

Early 2026, we're introducing Code-to-Tour, product tours that write themselves by reading your codebase. You've probably clocked that agents are very good at writing code, but they're even better at reading and comprehending it. Our agents discovered 80+ critical workflows in a production repo, then built all the product education automatically: tours, checklists, release notes. No manual mapping. No brittle selectors.

You’ll want to refine it, of course, that’s what Candu’s editor is for, but you shouldn’t need to stare at a blank page or hunt in the console for a stable selector.

Next month, we're publishing our manifesto: "The Death of Manual Product Tours." Because when code changes daily, documentation that doesn't self-heal is already obsolete.

The Team Making It Happen

None of this happens without the right people.

• Stuart Coope (CTO): With a  background in architecting large-scale systems, Stuart has been the architect behind our new reasoning and agentic pipelines. He has ensured our AI can reliably navigate complex, messy SPAs by moving beyond simple DOM scraping to actual code awareness.
• Kelly O’Connell (Product Advisor): We are thrilled to have Kelly’s guidance as we navigate the "Do It For Me" era of software. Her experience as a world-class product leader, including her roles as CPO at ActiveCampaign and VP of Product at Surveymonkey, is exactly the perspective we need to redefine product-led growth for an AI-native world.
• Rocio de Torres (Head of Design) turned "what if we could..." into interfaces people actually want to use. When AI can generate anything, design becomes even more critical. She's helping us make sure every AI-generated component feels intentional, not automated.
• Alexandra Hadjidaki (Senior Engineer) made our AI actually understand intent. Getting an LLM to work with a visual editor's nuances is like teaching someone to paint while blindfolded, but the result is an agent that feels like a colleague, not a tool.

The Real Story of 2025

We started the year with a dawning understanding that AI could help us build a banner. We're ending it having built something bigger: an AI that understands your product in full, then builds the essential experiences for you.

The best part? We're just getting started. 

2025 was about proving the impossible—that AI could actually build production-ready UI. 2026 is about making manual UI creation feel antiquated.

Want to see what we mean? Watch me build an upgrade banner in 60 seconds, switching between prompting and editing like they were always meant to work together.

Because they were.

Long live no-code, 

Jonathan Anderson
Founder & CEO, Candu

P.S. If you're tired of your product tours breaking every sprint, grab our Copilot beta. The future doesn't build itself. Actually, wait... now it does.