Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #447

The following is a conversation with the founding members of the Cursor team, Michael Truhl, Swale Asif, Arvid Lundmark, and Aman Singer. Cursor is a code editor based on VS 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 collaboration in designing and engineering complicated and powerful systems. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Michael, Swale, Arvid, and Aman. All right, this is awesome. We have Michael, Aman, Swale, Arvid here from the Cursor team. First up, big ridiculous question, what's the point of a code editor?

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, uh, 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 know, that's everything from giving you visual differentiation of, like, the actual tokens in the code to, so you can, like, scan it quickly, to letting you navigate around the code base, sort of like you're navigating around the internet with, like, hyperlinks. You're going to sort of definitions of things you're using, to error checking, um, to, you know, to catch rudimentary bugs. Um, and so traditionally, that's what a code editor has meant, and I think that what a code editor is, is going to change a lot over the next 10 years, um, as what it means to build software maybe starts to look a bit different.

I th- I think also a 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... (laughs)

Yeah. (laughs)

Oh yeah, that should be a T-shirt.

(laughs)

But, like, fundamentally, I think one of the things that draws a lot of people to- to building stuff on computers is this, like, insane integration speed, where, you know, in other disciplines, you might be sort of gatekept 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, uh, that alone, you can- you can build really cool stuff really quickly.