The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
shows 
every show 44 of 44
Truell: Long-term demand for software engineers will increase despite AI
“I think long into the future, yes, there will actually be more demand for engineers.”
Truell: All Software Development Will Flow Through Models Within Five Years
“And I think we took a step back and realized that if we were being really consistent with our beliefs, you know, there was going to be an opportunity for all of coding to change in the next five years and for all of software development to flow through models.”
Truell: Software creation will move to higher abstraction levels within a decade
“We think that over the next five to 10 years, it will be possible to invent a new way to build software that's higher level and more productive. That's just as still down to defining how you want the software to work and how you want the software to look.”
Truell: AI coding tools will become 10x more useful within a year
“And I think that the game in the next six months to a year is to make both of those, you know, an order of magnitude more useful.”
Truell: Major AI labs are currently bottlenecked by software engineering capacity
“The next AI model, which, you know, if you talk to the labs, largely they're bottlenecked on engineering capacity.”
Truell: AI models will mediate all programming, requiring complete UI control
“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 to control the UI.”
Truell: Future coding will use terse pseudocode instead of raw code
“And so a world, you know, kind of after, You know, after code I think it looks like a world where you have a representation of the logic of your software that does look more like English, right? You have kind of written down, you can imagine in doctrine form, …”
Truell: Engineers will rely less on carefulness and more on taste
“I think we will get to a place where you will be able to be less careful as a software engineer, which right now is an incredibly, incredibly important skill. And yeah, we'll move a little bit from carefulness a little bit more towards taste.”
Truell: Cursor's most successful developers use AI conservatively for scoped tasks
“So the customers we've seen have most success with AI, I think are still fairly conservative about some of the ways in which they use this stuff. And so I do think today that the most successful customers really lean on Things like you know, our next edit pred…”
Truell: One company will build the tool creating almost all software
“I think that there will be one company and to be determined if it's going to be us, but I do think that there will be one company that builds the general tool that builds almost all the world's software. And that will be a very, very generationally big busines…”
Truell: AI shift will be more consequential than the internet over decades
“I think it's gonna be more consequential than the internet. I think it's gonna be more consequential than, you know, any shift in tech that we've seen since, since the advent of computers. And I think it's gonna take a while. And I think it's gonna be a multi-…”
Truell: Fully transforming software engineering with AI will take decades
“AI is going to be this transformative technology maybe more so than, you know, any revolution in recent technological revolution in recent centuries, but it's going to take a couple of decades, and it's going to be this industry-wide effort where there are all…”
Truell: AI will eliminate the manual 'human compilation' step of programming
“And so I think that more and more of that, like, human compilation step will go away, and computers will be able to kind of fill in the gaps, fill in the details.”
Truell: ChatGPT supposedly cost only 1% more to train than GPT-3
“But it rumored that to go from GPT-III, which, you know, had existed for a while and didn't You know, impressed some people, but was certainly not the breakout moment ChatGPT was. To ChatGPT, it was like a one percent increase in the training costs.”
Truell: Most of the original GitHub Copilot team has left Microsoft
“The group of people that worked on the first version of Copilot have, by and large, gone on to do other things at other places.”
Truell: Cursor flew across the world to recruit candidates who rejected them
“Us growing the initial 10 people on the team, we did crazy recruiting stunts, like flying across the world to the person. Oh yeah. After they say no.”
Truell: AI code editors are moving from an iPod to iPhone moment
“I think that one of the key challenges facing the company in the future, and we've faced in the past, is we are in a market that's like, you know, had a iPod moment, and like, it's gonna have an iPhone moment.”
Truell: Cursor must become a multi-product AI coding provider
“I do think we're going to need to be a multi-product company going into the future. I think that there's a big multi-product opportunity in our space where there's a whole AI coding bundle to be built, and we kind of want to be the, ah, for many of our custome…”
Truell: Cursor maintains two-day in-office work trials past 200 employees
“And so, that's one of the more unorthodox things we do, is we have this two-day onsite, and we've clung to it, even though we are over 200 people now.”
Truell: Cursor plans early M&A to add products and GM structures
“I think increasingly in the future, you know, with the whole suite of products that are possible in our space and with the benefits we think of bundling those together, we're especially interested in earlier than most companies in their maturity using M&A as a…”
Truell: Cursor's first acquisition was Supermaven, founded by Tabnine's creator
“The first real M&A we did was SuperMaven. And so This as just one concrete example, this was a team of five people. It was started by the person who had built Copilot, GitHub Copilot before GitHub Copilot, which was tab nine and was also a researcher at OpenAI”
Truell: OpenAI's Original Codex Model Cost Around $100,000 to Train
“By our calculations, Codex, which was the first, this was the first autocomplete model behind GitHub Copilot, it didn't really cost that much money to train, even though, even back then, at kind of the beginning and middle of 2022, people were talking about ho…”
Truell: Developers on small codebases already let AI agents make all changes
“Already there, we see people kind of stepping up above the code to a higher level of abstraction and just asking essentially agents and AIs to make all the changes for them.”
Truell: AI writes 40% to 50% of all code produced inside Cursor
“You know, on average, we see about people using, you know, having AI write 40%, 50% of the lines of code produced within Cursor, but it's still a process of, you know, reading everything that comes out of the AI.”
Truell: Computer use and log inspection are essential for future AI coding
“But so computer using is kind of, is going to be important for the future of code. Being able to run the code, being able to look at data dog logs and interface with those tools that humans use.”
Truell: Automated AI coding will cause an explosion of hyper-niche software
“I think that, you know, one second order effect too will be many more pieces of niche software will exist.”
Truell: Cursor processes over 500 million daily model calls on custom inference
“Now in Cursor, we do over half a billion model calls per day on our own inference.”
Truell: Future IDEs will integrate external surfaces like Slack
“So I think that, you know, what the IDE is will totally change over time. And kind of our approach to, you know, having our own editor with premise non, it's gonna have to evolve over time. And I think that that will both include, you can spin off things from …”
Truell confirms Cursor reached roughly $1M in revenue around 2023
“You went from zero to one million around twenty-twenty-three, right? And it was, ah, it took a lot to get there, right? Yeah, it was a bit more than that, but sort of roughly that.”
Truell: Cursor ended 2023 with fewer than 10 employees
“I think we ended. 2023 at only single digits people. Like we were less than 10 still.”
Truell: OpenAI's original Codex model cost roughly $100,000 to train
“Is we did the back of the envelope math for what Codex, the first coding model, costed to train. From my memory, it only cost about 90 K or a hundred K by our calculations.”
Truell: Cursor's first prototype was built from scratch, not on VS Code
“The first version of Cursor was hand rolled. We now we use VS Code kind of as a base, like many browsers use Chromium as a base and it worked off of that. To begin with, we didn't, and built the prototype of Cursor from scratch, and that involved a lot of work…”
Truell: Cursor launched publicly three months after writing its first code
“And then we launched it out to the world within a couple of months from the first line of code. I think it was probably, probably three months.”