The End of the Designer–Engineer Divide

**Ryo Lu** (0:00)
My personal KPI at Cursor this year is to turn all the designers into coders. The roles will start blurring, the designers will start coding, the engineers will start designing, and then our shared language is code. You start not by getting everything perfect, you actually start by building. If you get something bad or like ugly, it's actually your job to make it pretty, the way you want it. And that's the part that the AIs can't really do right now. As we break the boundaries between these tools, as everyone can start talking with the code, magical things can happen.

**Aaron Epstein** (0:40)
Today, I am excited to welcome Ryo Lu. He's the head of design at Cursor, the leading AI coding tool used by more than a million people worldwide. Before that, he was a founding designer at Notion and a product designer at Stripe and Asana. Today, we'll talk about his background and design process, and then we'll hear his thoughts on the future of design in a world of AI. Ryo, welcome to Design Review.

**Ryo Lu** (1:03)
Thank you.

**Aaron Epstein** (1:04)
Maybe to start off, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into design in the first place?

**Ryo Lu** (1:09)
I was just like making websites since I was 11 I just kept making bigger websites. The first one was for this anime that I really liked. I just made it for myself. Then I started making community websites, like little forums, and then I made one when I was 17, for Apple fanboys in China. That got like kind of popular and I just kept doing it. When I started, I did not know like what's the difference between like design or engineering or product. It was just the whole thing. Then I became more like a professional designer. I made a couple of startups myself, and then I got an offer from Asana. So I came and I became a designer.

**Aaron Epstein** (1:59)
Were you technical all those years, like when you first started to design?

**Ryo Lu** (2:04)
I would say I kind of self-taught most of my software design building parts. So I studied CS and bio in college. But most of the CS courses were like so ancient. They did tell me like more systematically how to program but they weren't that helpful. Like how I learned is really by just making stuff, building things without knowing what the fuck I'm doing. Like I did not know the concept, the words. I just, I want to do this. I'll just figure out how to do it. Use whatever tool that's there and then you learn by doing that.

**Aaron Epstein** (2:40)
Yeah.

**Ryo Lu** (2:40)
But now it's like with the agent, with Cursor, you make this process so quick. Like instead of you felt like coding is a little scary. It wasn't like, you know, it's not something that we as designers are supposed to do. Or like you just feel like in order for me to start something new or like a prototype, I need to learn all of these like low level concepts that are kind of dependencies. It's kind of scary.

**Aaron Epstein** (3:07)
And that will take forever.

**Ryo Lu** (3:10)
It will take like a month. Almost like you need to like really focus on this and then go to a book camp and whatever. Versus now, you just ask the agent. And then if you don't know like exactly what you're doing, agents able to like fill you with the gaps. It can do research for you. It can search the web on what is the best way to do X, Y, Z. And it will help you do that. And then you learn. And you learn by doing. And you get the result really quickly. And you can iterate really quickly. So that's the difference.

**Aaron Epstein** (3:44)
And it sounds like you went through this journey of being frustrated that you were kind of put in the design box of like, this is the little piece that you should focus on. And now you have all these tools and you're able to actually build the thing that you envision, that you've designed. You can make it come to life and be real. And I know you kind of have a personal mission this year. Tell us more about that.

**Ryo Lu** (4:04)
Yeah. So my personal KPI at Cursor this year is to turn all the designers into coders. And then I don't want them to be say, we're forcing you to start learning how to code, we're like, how does the code editor work? How does Git work? All these little details. But rather, now it's time to just start building. Like you actually don't have to care about all the details anymore. Just let the agents fill the gap for you. But now you can actually start coding without knowing how to code. But you know, like as designers, as people who worked on software so long, we all have intuition of how things should work. Like we all know these things, like I don't know, say like version control for Git files and folders, all these things. We know them. We just maybe don't know exactly like, what is the right way to do it at this time or all the little details. But now it's like, you don't have to think about it anymore.