June 4, 2025
Canva Code is a new feature offered in Magic Studio, which allows you to create interactive elements inside your Canva designs. Canva AI uses a technique called “vibe coding” to build an element from the ground up, enabling users to achieve custom-programmed results from simple prompts. These interactive elements can then be placed into slides, designs, or digital infographics to enhance the viewer experience. Although this tool can be useful for enhancing your designs and creating more interactive infographic media, there are several notable limitations.
Vibe Coding
The term “vibe coding” was coined by computer scientist Andrej Karpathy (co-founder of OpenAI). Vibe coding is an approach to producing software by using AI instead of writing code manually. A person describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model (LLM) tuned for coding. The LLM then generates software based on that description, shifting the programmer’s role from writing code to guiding, testing, and refining the AI-generated source code (Roose, 2025).
Example Prompt
The example below shows a website designed and deployed using Canva AI. The site itself is entirely programmed by the GPT, which took a prompt to “Create an interactive website that demonstrates the solar system.”
Interactive Solar System Website Development
Observations
Designing the site was straightforward due to the absence of any manual coding. However, the process was marred by the tedious revision workflow. For each prompt suggesting a slight tweak or fix, Canva AI spent minutes completely recoding the entire project from the ground up. This means that even simple fixes—such as adding a button—could take up to three minutes, whereas manually coding the same change would take only a few seconds.
The example site demonstrates Canva AI’s current software design capabilities: the general concept is implemented, but finer elements of UX are often overlooked. For instance, the orbit overlaps the title, and certain elements (e.g., Mercury or Uranus) cannot be clicked, which highlights shortcomings in the AI’s ability to design a fully functional software tool.
The most significant issue with Canva AI, so far, is the inability to revise the project after it has been generated. When you receive a completed product, the only way to fix an issue is to request an entirely new design by the GPT model and wait another three minutes for the AI to rebuild your project. Additionally, once the design is finished, the interactive object can only be incorporated into a Canva design as an “embedded element,” meaning you cannot move layers within the element inside your project. This lack of customization makes the “code” feature in Canva AI difficult to use and implement effectively in most projects.
Key Takeaways
- Uses “vibe coding” to create interactive elements via an LLM.
- Capable of deploying interactive website shells directly from the editor.
- Non-agentic: unable to incorporate multi-step tasks into a design.
- Cannot integrate complex coding or external sources; the generated code is limited to standard-library functions (mouse movement, buttons, etc.).
- Difficult to edit or revise: you cannot modify any code directly, and each revision requires the AI to redesign the entire project.