Michael Truell is co-founder and CEO of Anysphere (Cursor). He discusses the impact of AI coding tools on software engineering job demand.
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,…”