Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers

**Ryo Lu** (0:00)
Over the last, I don't know, 15 years or so, the art of making software fragmented a lot, and then we kind of split into different roles. Each role kind of used their own tool, used their own artifact, they think in their own kind of words and lingo. With Cursor, things kind of flip again.

**Jennifer Li** (0:19)
For the first time, that design is such an approachable concept and skill set to a lot more people, and it brings together sort of people who have aspirations for design and wanting to build things, wanting to prototype things, putting beautiful stuff out in the world.

**Ryo Lu** (0:34)
There needs to be something for the human to specify what is good, what is right, how I want to do it. If you don't put in that opinion, it will just produce AI's law. People will always have their strength for their unique special skill. I see AI as almost like a universal interface. So designers are trying to figure out what is the best configuration and the simplest state for all of us. The beauty is actually putting things all together.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:12)
What happens when the designer becomes the developer? When mockups that used to die in Figma can suddenly become living products in minutes. My guests today are Jennifer Li, general partner at a16z and Ryo Lu, head of design at Cursor, the AI code editor that's collapsing the traditional boundaries between design and engineering. Ryo spent years at Notion and Asana, watching his designs get stuck in endless meetings and handoffs. Now he's building tools that let designers ship real software themselves. We're exploring how AI is ending the era of fragmented teams, why taste isn't really worth talking about, and what it means when a single person could do what used to take an entire product team.
Ryo, welcome to the a16z podcast. Jennifer, you've been thinking a lot about evolution of design, as it relates to as well as software development. Why don't you talk about what got you so excited about having Ryo and why we have this conversation?

**Jennifer Li** (2:07)
Ryo and I got to know each other over the past few months talking about how large language models and AI tools are going to impact not just designers, design engineers, and how people are building prototypes and coming up with great ideas. I feel like for the first time that design is such an approachable concept and skill set to a lot more people, and it brings together sort of people who have aspirations for design and wanting to build things, wanting to prototype things, putting beautiful stuff out in the world much, much easier and faster. So Ryo has gone through a lot of thinking and journey of what design means in the sense of having Cursor being part of the building blocks of it. I just really wanted to have him on the podcast and talk about the future of both coding and design.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:59)
Ryo, you've been at Notion now, obviously, you're the head of design at Cursor. Why don't you take us through your journey and how you've been thinking about some of these topics?

**Ryo Lu** (3:06)
I think to me, it's like building software.
There's like so many layers of abstractions and depth that you need to take care of. And in order to do something really great, you actually need to know everything. Or like you assemble a team that works really well together with people with different strength on every layer. Maybe you have the greatest infra engineers, people doing ML. Maybe you have really good design engineers who really, like they can just hand write CSS and then they'll be like perfect. In order for say one person to do all of this or learn all of this, it takes a long time of trial and error. You have to build from the simplest things to gradually more complex, scale it up to more people, share your workout to the public, see what happens, do this feedback loop. If you're doing it in a team, sometimes it takes even longer because say you're just a designer, you're doing some mocks in Figma and then you shared it out, you got some feedback. And your PM needs to do this PRD thing and then run more meetings. And then there's more people involved and then they're like, ah, and takes a long time. And then maybe a year later, your design came out, but then it's like 20% of what you wanted. But with this new thing with Cursor, you can just say you have an idea. It might be a little ambiguous. You just tell it to tell the agent. And then it might give you something maybe like 60%, 70% on the first shot. But you kind of skipped a lot of the complexities. We kind of transformed from like you need to understand all this thing, all these concepts of making software. Then you can do something too. I can do something now. And then I might get something that's maybe imperfect, not exactly what I want. But the process of iterating and like kind of poking at it becomes really quick. And then as the agents evolve, as the models get better, as it talks to more tools, it understands visuals better. It can talk to Figma, the mocks that I had. It can talk to Notion, all the ideas, the docs, the meeting nodes, anything. And the most important thing is it knows the code base, which is the truth, the material of how we build software. So that kind of changes the whole thing. It's like the tool not only impacts the individual software engineers, like for them, maybe like for Cursor is like we kind of try to fit as many workflows and people as we can. Say there's like people who they pride themselves at like really think thoroughly, write the most clean code. For those people they can just type and then we do the tab thing. And the tab thing got really good at like, it's almost like it knows what you want to do next. So for those people, they can do that. But there's like increasingly more people doing the agent.