#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with the founding members of the Cursor team, Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. Cursor is a code editor based on VS code that has a lot of powerful features for AI-assisted coding. It has captivated the attention and excitement of the programming and AI communities. So I thought this is an excellent opportunity to dive deep into the role of AI in programming. This is a super technical conversation that is bigger than just about one code editor. It's about the future of programming and in general, the future of human AI collaboration in designing and engineering complicated and powerful systems. Now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Encore for unifying your machine learning stack, Masterclass for learning, Shopify for selling stuff online, NetSuite for your business, and AG1 for your health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, or take a survey or send me questions for an AMA, all of that will be great. Go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, onto the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too. This episode is brought to you by Enchord, a platform that provides data-focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation management, and for model evaluation. One of the things I love about these guys is they have a great blog that describes cleanly. I mean, it's technical, but it's not too technical, but it's sufficiently technical to where it's actually describing the idea is not BS. It's blog posts on the state of the art, like the OpenAI 1 model that was just released. So sometimes they integrate it into why this is a part of Encore, why this makes sense, and sometimes not. And so I love that. I recommend their blog just in general. That said, when they are looking at state of the art models, they are always looking for ways to integrate it into their platform. Basically, it's a place to organize your data, and data is everything. This was true before the popularity and the explosion of attention methods of transformers, and it is still very much true now. Sort of the non-synthetic, the human-generated data is extremely important. How you generate that data, how you organize that data, how you leverage it, how you train on it, how you fine tune on it, the pre-training, the post-training, all of it, the whole thing. Data is extremely, extremely important. And so Encore takes data very seriously. Anyway, go try out Encore to create, annotate, and manage your AI data at encore.com/lex. That's encore.com/lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Carlos Santana on guitar, for example. I loved that one. There's a few guitar ones, Tom Morello too. Great, great, great stuff. But Carlos Santana, his instrumental Europa. I haven't quite tried to play that, but it's on my to-do list. It's sort of one of those things. You know for sure this is a thing I will play because it's too beautiful. It's too soulful. It feels like once you play, you understand something about the guitar that you didn't before. It's not blues. It's not, I don't know what it is. It's some kind of dreamlike teleportation into a psychedelic world where the tone is warmer than anything else I've ever heard. And still the guitar can cry. I don't know. I love it. He's a genius. So it's such a gift that you can get a genius like that to teach us about his secrets, get unlimited access to every Masterclass, and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com/lexpod. That's masterclass.com/lexpod.
This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store or simple looking online store, like the one I put together at lexfridman.com/store. I have a few shirts on there in case you're interested. And speaking of shirts, I'm reminded of thrift stores, which I very much loved for a long time. I still love thrift stores or a nice place to get stuff, like, I don't know, kitchen stuff and clothing. And the kind of clothing you get at thrift stores is actually pretty interesting because there's shirts there. They're just unlike anything else you would get anywhere else. So if you're sort of selective and creative minded, there's a lot of interesting fashion that's there. And in terms of t-shirts, there's just like hilarious t-shirts. T-shirts that are very far away from the kind of trajectories you have taken in life or are not, but you just haven't thought about it like a band that you love, but you never would have thought to wear their t-shirt. Anyway, a little bit, I think of Shopify as the internet's thrift store. Of course, you can do super classy, you can do super fancy, or you can do super thrift. All of it is possible. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. Sometimes I think that NetSuite is supporting this podcast because they're trolling me. They're saying, hey, Lex, aren't you doing a little too much talking? Maybe you should be building more. I agree with you, NetSuite. I agree with you. And so every time I do an ad read for NetSuite, it is a chance for me to confront my Jungian shadow. Some of the demons emerge from the subconscious and ask questions that I don't have answers to. Questions about one's mortality and that life is short, and that one of the most fulfilling things in life is to have a family and kids and all of these, things I would very much like to have. And also the reality that I love programming and I love building, I love creating cool things that people can use and share and that would make their life better. All of that. Of course, I also love listening to podcasts. And I kind of think of this podcast as me listening to a podcast where I can also maybe participate by asking questions. So all of these things that you love, but you ask the hard question of like, okay, while life is slipping away, it's short. It really, really is short. What do you want to do with the rest of the minutes and the hours that make up your life? Yeah. So thank you for the existential crisis, Nasweet. I appreciate it. If you're running a business, if you have taken a leap into the unknown and started a company, then you should be using the right tools to manage that company. In fact, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to Nasweet. Take advantage of Nasweet's flexible financing plan at nasweet.com/lex. That's nasweet.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by The Delicious, The Delicious AG1. It's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It's basically a super awesome multivitamin that makes me feel like I have my life together. Even when everything else feels like it's falling apart, at least I have AG1. At least I have that nutritional foundation to my life. It's all the fasting I'm doing, all the carnivore diets, all the physical endurance events and the mental madness of staying up all night or just the stress of certain things I'm going through, all of that. AG1 is there, at least I have the vitamins. Also, I sometimes wonder, they used to be called Athletic Greens and now they're called AG1. I always wonder, is AG2 coming? Why is it just one? It's an interesting branding decision, like AG1. Me as an OCD programmer type, it's like, okay, is this a versioning thing? Is this like AG 0.1 alpha? When is the final release? Anyway, the thing I like to say and to consume is AG1. They'll give you one month supply, a fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex.