Prediction Open · timeframe May 2030
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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, …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
Truell: 'Vibe coding' breaks down when developers cannot understand scaling codebases
“By not understanding the details under the hood right now, you then very quickly get to a place where you're kind of limited. At a certain point where you create something that's big enough that you can't change.”
Insight
Truell: AI coding tools must control the full IDE, not just plugins
“The extensibility that existing coding environments have is so, so, so limited. So if you think that the UI is going to change a lot, if you think that the form factor program is going to change a lot, you necessarily need to have control over the entire appli…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Insight
Truell: AI product builders operate between software and foundation model labs
“It's kind of a new form of product building where it's very interdisciplinary in that we are something in between a normal software company and then in between a normal software company and then a foundation model company in that you know we want to develop a,…”
Disclosure
Truell: Every magic moment in Cursor involves a custom in-house model
“At this point, every magic moment in Cursor involves a custom model in some way.”
Insight
Truell: Unlike writing, the next 30 minutes of coding is entirely predictable
“Code is this weird form of work where sometimes really the next five, 10, 20,
30 minutes of your work is entirely predictable from looking over your shoulder. And I would contrast this with writing.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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-…”
Disclosure
Truell: Cursor's goal is inventing an intent-based programming paradigm
“Our goal with Cursor is to invent, ah, sort of a new type of programming a very different way to build software that's kind of just distilled down into you describing the intent to the computer for what you want in the most concise way possible, ah, and really…”
Opinion
Truell: Chatbot interfaces lack the precision needed for software engineering
“The problem with the chatbot style end of things is that lacks a lot of precision. If you want humans to have completely, you know, complete control over what the software looks like and how it works, you need to let them, you know, gesture at what they want t…”
Disclosure
Truell: Cursor let sales and marketing fires burn early on
“Some of the normal things that people would maybe Reach for in, in building the company early on we really let those fires burn for a long time, especially when it came to things like sales and marketing.”
Insight
Truell: AI entrenchment cannot protect companies from being leapfrogged
“And I, you know, I truly just think that the ceiling is so high that kind of no matter what, you know, entrenchment you build you can be leapfrogged. And I think that this resembles markets that are maybe a little bit different from normal software markets, no…”
Insight
Truell: AI defensibility comes from economies of scale in R&D
“If you're in a place where, you know, big investments and you know, having more and more great people working on the right path can keep giving you value, then you can get kind of these economies of scale of R&D, and you can kind of have, you know, deeply work…”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Insight
Truell: Senior engineers on average underrate AI and stick to existing workflows
“By and large, I would say, on average, as a group, the senior engineers underrate what AI can do for them and stick to their existing workflows.”
Insight
Truell: AI software has a uniquely high ceiling for leapfrog innovation
“I think the exciting thing about AI is, in a bunch of places, and I think this is, you know, very much still true of our space, and you can talk about how we think about that and how we deal with that, but you know, I think that just the ceiling is really high…”
Insight
Truell: Background AI agents best fit easily specified tasks like bug fixes
“And I think the background stuff, there's like a segment of programming that it's especially useful for, which is type of programming tasks where it's very easy to specify exactly what you want with, you know, without much description, and exactly what correct…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 …”
Disclosure
Truell: Cursor post-trains top open-source and closed-source foundation models
“Starting from the very best you know pre-trained models that exist out there. Often open source ones, you know, sometimes in collaboration with these big model providers that, that don't share their weights out into the world because the thing we care about le…”
Insight
Truell: Giant prompts are a recipe for disaster; break tasks down
“Instead, what I would do is I would chop things up into bits, and you can spend basically, you know, the same amount of time specifying things overall, but chopped up more. So you're specifying a little bit, you're getting a little bit of work, you're specifyi…”
Insight
Truell: Junior engineers over-rely on AI wholesale for end-to-end coding
“The junior engineers we see going a little too wholesale, relying on AI for everything, and we're not yet in a place where you can kind of do that end-to-end on a professional tool, you know, working with 1000 of other people within a long-lived code base.”
