The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 73 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ugarte: Microsoft and early rivals lost AI coding lead due to culture
“AI coding has always been competitive from when cursor first, first kind of came to be. And at the time the competitors were Microsoft and others and a handful of maybe 10 or 20 companies. And I think it's notable that none of those competitors are at the fore…”
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.”
Ward: Demand for narrowly specialized engineers and new grads is waning
“And we want that like super deep technical engineer that has a little bit more stronger product sense. And so you kind of see that. So I think the people who are maybe like very narrow, very deep and like overly specialized in a way are waning like in like, in…”
Natural language conversation is the new abstraction layer above code
“What's the layer that we are adding on top of code where people don't need to worry about code anymore. And at that point, it was like a year ago that we chatted, and it feels like this is the layer Is the agent conversation of what it is, what it's thinking a…”
Huyen: A randomized engineering trial found top performers gained most from Cursor
“He was like, okay, here's more like currently like best performing, average performing, and lowest performing. And then there's a randomized trial. So like they give like half of each group, like access to like cursor. And then he was noticed like over time, I…”
Rachitsky: Cursor May Be Second Fastest Growing Company Behind ChatGPT
“I think about cursor, maybe the fastest, maybe the second fastest growing company behind ChatGPT.”
Balfour: Cursor overtook GitHub Copilot's market share in under nine months
“And so it's amazing to see something like cursor overtake market share of something like GitHub co-pilot in nine months or less, right? Like that, that's how fast it happened.”
Schulhoff: Autonomous AI coding agents will suffer prompt-injection code exploits
“We're just going to see these things get deployed and they're going to be broken. So there's a lot of like AI coding agents out there. There's Cursor, there's, I guess, Windsurf, Devon, Copilot. So all of those tools exist and they can do things right now Like…”
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 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…”
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: 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,…”
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.”
Simons: Cursor is the only code-gen startup ahead of Bolt in revenue
“Our company wasn't doing AI stuff the six months ago, we had no AI products and just out of nowhere, we you know, From almost death of the company to being, you know, the number one by traffic revenue, et cetera, like, you know, AI co-gen app that's, you know,…”
Claude 3.5 Sonnet was the first model reliable enough for AI coding
“Sonnet was, you know, Sonnet was the, really the first model that flipped the equation because that was really us and all cursor and all these other things. The rapid growth started the second sauna went online, right? Like we actually tried building bull like…”
Ugarte: Cursor built ahead of models, then deleted temporary engineering scaffolding
“How could we pull that stuff to today? Even if it requires a little bit of engineering on top to make it work or a lot of engineering on top. To make it work. Even it requires changing the product in a specific way so the user can interact with this new capabi…”
Ugarte: Cursor would not have succeeded by focusing on moats
“I will say that I think if Cursor and many other successful companies of this kind of vintage, I think if they had thought About moats slash kind of tried to work backwards from some strategy diagram or like, you know maybe more abstract notion of how a compan…”
Ugarte: AI enterprise adoption starts with early adopters building side projects
“What we saw for coding was a very simple pattern, which was there was an early adopter crowd. The early adopter crowd would use these coding tools and really push them to the limits. And they would mostly push them to the limits on individual projects. They wo…”
Ugarte: Shipping production software requires surfaces pixel-optimized for developers
“Ultimately when you're shipping production software, we're big believers that that is going to require, you know, a product where every pixel is optimized for that end user.”
Ward: High-volume recruiting funnels inevitably regress candidate quality to the mean
“Assuming I have really good interview process and hygiene and all these things, you kind of regress to the mean over time as you get to volume.”
Ward: Treating recruiting as a linear sales funnel is a fallacy
“In a sales funnel, you know, as a salesperson, you're typically selling a widget, a piece of software, an item, those things are relatively static and rational. In recruiting, you have an irrational unit of a hiring manager and recruiter and in another rationa…”
Ward: High-touch bespoke recruiting works by displacing time onto fewer candidates
“So when you are thinking about a hundred candidates for every role, then this is, that does not scale. But when you're narrowing that down to a small percentage of people that you've been kind of laying groundwork with over time, It comes because now people ar…”
Ward: Hiring managers cannot intuitively identify top talent without objective criteria
“If you've ever heard that phrase, like, I will, I'll know what, I'll know it when I see it. I'll know what great looks like. You actually, you won't. You won't see, you won't know, because you haven't spent, like, the time objectively identifying what that, wh…”
Ward: Manual in-person network mining beats automated AI sourcing tools
“I think the most valuable one is the most time intensive one, which is spending time and digging into people's networks. I, you know, we've shared this before, but people on my team whose entire job is to dig into our current employees networks. You could auto…”
Ward: Founders err by expecting first Head of Talent to do everything
“I think the thing they try to do is do this silver bullet hire which is a first, like, head of talent, and they kind of collapse two, can keep competing skill sets into one. Okay, so when you are, generally as a founder, when you're ready to hire your first re…”
Ward: Every recruiter should become a talent engineer building internal tools
“My warm take, not a hot take, my warm take is like every recruiter should be a talent engineer. Like the things that recruiters now have at their fingertips that they could build in cursor or other tools is really phenomenal.”
Ward: Companies must evaluate talent on their own needs, not past employers
“And your company is different. Your product is different. And so you owe to yourself to kind of identify what does great look like for you and who's going to be successful in this role in this product versus what was successful for someone else in a process th…”
Shipper: Cursor's cloud implementation is more advanced than OpenAI's or Anthropic's
“Like, I think that Cursor's cloud implementation is better than either OpenAI or Anthropix and is more advanced.”
Cherny: Claude Code went from writing 20% to 100% of his code
“Because even in February when we released it was writing maybe, I don't know, like, 20% of my code, not more. And even in May, it was writing maybe 30%. I was still using, you know, Kurtzer for most of my code. And it only crossed a hundred percent in November…”
Modern AI coding tools can fix any bug if given awareness
“Lovable, Cursor, Cloud Code, you name it, all these tools are good enough today to fix any problem they're aware of.”
Arnovitz: Non-technical builders should progress gradually from ChatGPT to Cursor
“I think if you see this where I'm working like in Claude or in cursor, you might be excited to start using those, but I would really recommend starting slow with a GPT project. Beautiful UI, super simple, then maybe graduate to like a bolt or a lovable. And th…”
Mike Krieger confirms Anthropic is not planning to acquire Cursor
“I don't think we're gonna buy a cursor.
Cursor's very big but we love working with them.”
Chennapragada: Independent AI coding tools do not directly threaten GitHub's ecosystem
“And I think the, yeah, the idea again is that, you know, code generation as a tool will unlock lot more products. I mean, they're not all competitors to the fact of they're not all kind of you know doing the same job. I think when you're at the end of the day,…”
Rachitsky: AI coding startup Cursor hit $300M ARR in two years
“I just saw that Cursor hit three hundred million ARR in two years.”
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…”
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.”
Ugarte: AI companies must reinvent themselves every six months to survive
“And if we as a company can't completely reinvent ourselves every six months, which recently it's felt even shorter than that, of kind of complete, like, very significant reinventions of our priorities, the core product, what users feel we're gonna lose.”
Ward: Cursor reinstated work trials because traditional interviews lacked confidence
“When we ran that experiment you know, because it is quite expensive. It is also a big ask of candidates. We really struggled to have confidence in our decision. Again, this is a confidence building function. And so we are excited to bring it back.”
Ward: Offer reneges between acceptance and start dates are currently increasing
“One thing that we didn't talk about, which I think is happening, I'm seeing more of is reneges on offers, and so I think a lot of companies get to the yes of the offer acceptance, and there's often like a gap of time.”
Ward: Work samples predict success better than traditional across-the-table interviews
“Research has shown that work samples are the highest predictor of success at a company, but yet most companies are still spending a lot of time doing one-to-one across the table assessments.”
Ward: Companies err on onsites by extracting information without giving signal
“I think this is where most companies get it wrong on the onsite. They're almost always buying. This is like, we are assessing, we're extracting information. We're not giving much back to the candidate. And I'm a big fan of the power of self-selection.”
Ward: Cursor runs daily standups to close high-caliber engineering candidates
“Closing is a team sport, and so when we have a candidate particularly, like, a high-profile, high-caliber, there are often daily stand-ups Around that candidate about what we're doing to get them to yes.”
Ward: Cursor prioritizes in-office candidate visits to leverage team presence
“We try to play home games when we can, because you have the power of the team. Right, you have the power. And so, you know, one analogy I think about is, like, when you, sometimes when you walk on, when some people are considering university early in their liv…”
Ward: AI model release cadences have compressed from months to days
“There was a world where the models were coming out every three or four months. We're down to a number of days between models”
Ward: Finding warm intros demands as much effort as crafting candidate outreach
“We spend a lot of time here thinking about who can create a warm intro to that person. Almost as much effort goes into that Then it does the actual messaging and the, right? Because if you get the right person that accelerates it, right?”
Ward: Cursor avoids hiring committees to let hiring managers lead decisions
“We don't have hiring committees. It is hiring manager led. They get lots of input from the team.”
Ward: Asking 'who is the best person' is the worst referral question
“The mistake that most companies make is they'll say, hey, Lenny, who's the best, ah, product engineer you know? That is the worst question you can ask. The best, the better question to ask is, hey, Lenny, of all the product engineers you've worked with, who st…”
Ward: Forward deployed engineers face severe talent supply shortages
“I think one thing that's really in demand is this, and there's lots of different names for it, but there's like forward deployed engineer, this like technical person who can partner with a sales team and partner with a customer to deploy what is a, you know, c…”