#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is conversation with the founding members of the Cursor team, Michael Truel, Swalley Asif, Arvid Lundmark, and Aman Sanger. Cursor is a code editor based on Versus code that adds 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 collaborati
So the the code editor is largely the place where you build software. And today or for a long time, that's meant the place where you text edit, a formal programming language. And for people who aren't programmers, the way to think of a code editor is like a really souped up word processor for programmers, where the reason it's it's souped up is code has a lot of structure. And so the the quote unquote word processor, the code editor can actually do a lot for you that word processors, you know, sort of in the writing space haven't been able to do for for people editing text there. And so, you k
I think I think also code editor should just be fun.
Yes. That is very important. That is very important. And it's actually sort of an underrated aspect of how we decide what to build. Like, a lot of the things that we build and then we we try them out, we do an experiment, and then we actually throw them out because they're not fun. And and so a big part of being fun is like being fast a lot of the time. Fast is fun. Yeah.
Fast is well, yeah. Yeah. That should be a t shirt.
Like like, fundamentally, I think one of the things that draws a lot of people to to building stuff on computers is this, like, insane iteration speed, where, you know, in other disciplines, you might be sort of gatecapped by resources or the ability even the ability, you know, to get a large group together. And coding is this, like, amazing thing where it's you and the computer, and, that alone, you can you can build really cool stuff really quickly.
So for people who don't know, Cursor is this super cool new editor that's a fork of Versus Code. It would be interesting to get your kind of explanation of your own journey of editors. How did you I think all of you are were big fans of Versus Code with Copilot. How did you arrive to Versus Code, and how did that lead to your journey with Cursor? Yeah.
So I think a lot of us well, all of us were originally Vim users. Pure
pure Vim. Pure
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