Truell: Cursor originally started as an AI CAD tool for mechanical engineers
Michael Truell · Michael Truell: How Cursor Builds at the Speed of AI · Nov 10, 2025 · at 3:58
Michael Truell is the co-founder and CEO of Cursor. He discusses the company's early product iteration and initial false start before pivoting to AI software development tools.
0:00 / 0:10exact quote · 10.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Yeah, initial false start of working on, ah, working on mechanical engineering actually, and working on mech models to help people be more productive within CAD systems, and also building, building our own sort of CAD system.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Michael Truell
Truell: Microsoft will struggle to compete in AI code editing
“I think it's one of the things that makes it pretty tricky for a Microsoft to really compete in a big way.”
Truell: Public cloud providers are figuring out extreme scale on the fly
“You think of these public clouds as they have it all together but really it's a very small set of customers for the highest, highest level of scale, and they're figuring it out on the fly.”
Truell: Software engineering remains far from full automation
“Despite the headlines, despite how much demand there is in this market, and how much software's changed over the last few years, it's so far away from being automated. It's so inefficient. Building software in a professional setting, especially with, you know,…”
Truell: Cursor originally built its IDE from scratch before forking VS Code
“We didn't even fork VS code. We actually built from scratch. So we built IDEA from scratch that we used ourselves as a daily driver. Couple more weeks to actually get into other people's hands. And then in the span of total, I think a couple of months, we had …”