Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents And Why Taste Still Matters

**Michael Truell** (0:00)
For us, the end goal is to replace coding with something much better. I think that this is going to be a decade where just your ability to build will be so magnified. If you keep pushing the frontier faster than other people, you can get really big gains occurring to you. Building a company is hard, and so you may as well work on the thing that you're really excited about. And so, yeah, we set off to work on the future of code.

**Garry** (0:24)
Welcome back to another episode of How to Build the Future. Today, I'm joined by Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, the AI coding platform we all know and love. They recently hit a $9 billion valuation and are one of the fastest growing startups of all time, reaching $100 million ARR just 20 months after launching. Michael, thanks for joining us.

**Michael Truell** (0:50)
Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

**Garry** (0:52)
You've said the goal of Cursor is to actually invent a new type of programming, where you can just describe what you want and it gets built. Talk to me about that.

**Michael Truell** (1:02)
Yeah, the goal with the company is to replace coding with something that's much better. Me and my three co-founders, we've been programmers for a long time. More than anything, that's what we are. The thing that attracted us to coding is that you get to build things really quickly. To do things that are sort of simple to describe, coding requires editing millions of lines of kind of esoteric formal programming languages, requires doing lots and lots of labor to actually make things show up on the screen that are kind of simple to describe. We think that over the next five to ten years, it will be possible to invent a new way to build software that's higher level and more productive, that's just as still down to defining how you want the software to work and how you want the software to look. And so our goal with Cursor is to get there. And our path to getting there is to at any given point in time, always be the best way to code with AI and then evolve that process, evolve it away from normal programming to something that looks very different.

**Garry** (1:54)
So some people would say that is what we have today. You sort of describe what you want and out it comes. What would you say to that? Like, are we there yet? You know, what are the steps to where you really want to go?

**Michael Truell** (2:05)
We're seeing the first signs of things really changing. I think you guys are probably on the forefront of it with YC, because I think that in smaller code bases with smaller groups of people working on a piece of software, that's where you feel the change the most. Already there, we see people kind of stepping up above the code to a higher level of abstraction. And just asking, essentially, agents and AIs to make all the changes for them. In the professional world, I think there's still a ways to go. I think that the whole idea of kind of vibe coding or coding without really looking at the code and understanding it, it doesn't really work. There are lots of nth order effects. You know, if you're dealing with millions of lines of code and dozens or hundreds of people working on something over the course of many years, right now you can't really just avoid thinking about the code. Our primary focus is to help professional programmers, to help people who build software for a living. In those environments, people are more and more using AI to code. You know, on average we see about people having AI write 40%, 50% of the lines of code produced within Cursor, but it's still a process of reading everything that comes out of the AI. And so an important chasm for us to cross as a product will be getting to a place where we become less of a productivity tool that's helping you look at, read, write, understand code, and where the artifact kind of changes. I think for professional developers, there's still ways to go there.

**Garry** (3:21)
In your head, do you think of it as like different tiers? There's sort of obviously startups are starting out with zero lines of code, so that's very easy. Is there a point that you're tracking right now where, well, that's when just vibe coding it stops working, and that's when things sort of become real.

**Michael Truell** (3:39)
The vibe coding style of things is definitely not something that we recommend if you're going to have the code stay around for a really long time. I think that one of the things that characterizes software development when you're two, three person, four person startup and you're kind of moving around and trying to figure out what you're doing is often the code is only going to be around for weeks. Right now, we're in this phase where AI is kind of operating as a helper for you, right? So kind of like the main ways in which people are using AI to code, they're either delegating tasks to an AI and they're saying, go do this thing for me, go answer this question for me, or they have an AI looking over their shoulder and taking over the keyboard every once in a while. That's kind of the tab form factor. And I think that the game in the next six months to a year is to make both of those in order of magnitude more useful. Coding sometimes is incredibly predictable when you're just looking over someone's shoulder the next 10, 15, 20 minutes of their work. And so the tab form factor can go very far, and the agent form factor of delegating to another human can go very far too. And then I think that once those start to get mature, and for 25, 30 percent of professional development, you can just entirely lean on those end to end without really looking at things. Then there will be all of these other things to figure out about how you make that work in the real world. One way in which you can view LLMs is if you interface with them like a human, like a helper. Another way in which you can view LLMs is they're kind of an advance in compiler or interpreter technology. It's going to be always helpful if we are a tool to help a human go from an idea in their head to something on the screen to give people control over the finest details. That's one of the product challenges we have in front of us. You should always be able to move something a few pixels over. You should always be able to edit something very specific about the logic. I think one useful UI always to have there is to have written down the logic of the software and you can point at various bits of the logic and actually edit them. But if we were to get to a place where you don't have to pay attention to the code as much, that written down version of the logic of the software is going to have to get higher level.