"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 ..."

"future of code. Welcome back to another episode of How to Build the Future. Today I'm joined by Michael Tru, co-founder and CEO of Anyphere, the company behind Cursor, the AI coding platform we all kn..."

"million ARR just 20 months after launching. Michael, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. You've said the goal of cursor is to actually invent a new type of programming ..."

"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..."

"to get there and you know 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 uh you know evolve it away from normal programm..."

"to where you really want to go? We're seeing the first signs of things really changing. Um I think you guys are probably on the forefront of it with YC because I think that in smaller code bases with ..."

"uh 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 a..."

"your head do you think of it as uh like different tiers there 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 w..."

"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 ..."

"work in the real world. One way in which you can view LMS is their you interface with them like a human like a helper. Um another way in which you can view LM is they're kind of an advanced in compile..."

"to get higher level. And so yeah we're excited about you know after you get agents working after you get kind of the tab form factor very mature does AI actually evolve what a what it means to be writ..."

"things is definitely an issue where you know if you have 10 million lines of code that's you know maybe 100 million tokens um and both having a model that can actually ingest that and having it be cos..."

"AI can make forward progress on a task. And it's gone up from, you know, seconds to I think I I don't know the details of how these numbers are actually gotten but I think someone's claiming some of t..."

"the task of making coding agents superhuman. And then you know one thing I will note kind of hearkening back to a last response is that even if you had something you could talk to that was human level..."

"actually, you know, be able to they need to be able to see actually. Yeah. And it's been interesting seeing them improve at the aesthetic side of things. And I think that that's actually like an inter..."

"um it's kind of a hack around the continual learning problem. So given this sort of future that everyone's building towards and you're certainly a leader uh at the forefront of it, you know, what do y..."

"There's that quote, good people will help you hit, you know, this bar, but the truly great, the truly masterful they uh, you know, hit a bar that you can't even see. Yeah. So, and that requires taste...."

"largely they're bottlenecked on engineering capacity. I think all of that will just just improve a ton. I think that you know one second order effect two will be many more pieces of niche software wil..."

"them. The physics of digital space already, are, so, great, but, I, think that that's just going to you know get turned up many notches into the future. Things that you want to want to happen on compu..."

"to pick an area of knowledge work and then work on what that knowledge work became as AI got more mature. We were very interested in the shape of a company where you build build a product for for that..."

"And it's a an interesting problem. It's one that academics have worked on. It's actually one that Deep Minds worked on a bit too. And and these were not large language models per se. You can do it ent..."

"the what the final thing looks like. It's pretty tricky. But we worked on that for a bit. Uh we there was a ton of data work to do there, a ton of data scraping where there's CAD data that exists on t..."

"Yeah. I guess alongside that you were also getting into training your own models to be able to do this which were you know and using RL and that was very useful and also learning how to spin up you kn..."

"um for for the cursor experience. So one of the things that's I mean a incredibly brave but also incredibly precient was to take a moment and say actually we don't know enough about CAD you know we ne..."

"the ceiling was just just so high and it really didn't seem like the existing players in the space were were aiming for a completely different type of coding. didn't seem like they had that ambition. ..."

"an interesting development. Heard it rumored that to go from GPD3 which you know had existed for a while and didn't you know impress some people but was certainly not the breakout moment chachbt was t..."

"the time. And yeah, that came from a place of thinking all of programming is going to flow through these models. It's going to, look, very, different, in, the future. You're going to need a controlled..."

"thing of of autocomplete but even after they got autocomplete to work um they needed to make changes at the editor level they couldn't do it entirely as an extension they had to go and change things i..."

"product building out the team. Also not just the product side of things but also starting to get the first versions of custom models behind cursor to power you know underneath cursor. um that things s..."

"sustainable. Paid power users that was what we you know it wasn't DAUs MAUs or anything like that. It was are you using this every single day for your work? That's what we were trying to get up. And t..."

"really kind of dialed in and taking off. Who were some some of the first tire? I mean I assume more engineers but you know so we agonized over the first hires and I think that if you want to go fast o..."

"go faster in the future is if someone comes in and they're not a great fit these people will act as an immune system against that, right? And they will be kind of keepers of holding the bar really hig..."

"disciplines where we are this company that needs to be something in between a foundation model lab and a normal software company and the models and product have to work together under one roof and so ..."

"it harder at times to even figure out how do you uh evaluate great engineers? Has that changed over time for you as you know, literally your own product has become more and more common? Do you select ..."

"without AI is still a really great timeboxed test for skill and intelligence and kind of the the things that you would always want someone on your team to to have. um as a programmer. But then the oth..."

"I do. Yes. It's something we think about a lot uh because I think that cursor in the future will have to look very different from cursor of today. One I I think you can do it by hiring the right peopl..."

"usually you're probably not going to be super willing to do that if you're maybe just view it as a job and you're applying to a bunch of of technology companies at the same time. So I think a big way ..."