Brendan Humphreys is the Head of Engineering at Canva. He outlines Canva's developer policy on code ownership when using AI assistants like Cursor and GitHub Copilot.
“We have a very important rule that you need to own the output of the tool. That means you have to understand it as if you'd written everything yourself, because ultimately the generated source is the source of truth, and it's going to go, go into the repository under your name.”
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More from Brendan Humphreys
Insight
Conversational AI interfaces have natural limitations for visual design workflows
“If you are doing any kind of visual communication, then there are going to be natural limits to a conversational interface. And people are going to want to be able to collaborate. They're going to want to be able to control for brand. They're going to want to …”
Brendan HumphreysJun 20, 2025▶ 25:30Inside a $3B ARR Rocketship — Canva CTO Brendan Humphreys on Deploying AI at Scale
Insight
AI coding tools pose serious quality risks when used by junior engineers
“There's a challenge for our industry in that we do see kind of slightly bipolar results for these tools in the hands of a senior engineer who can tell good code from bad code. They're very, very powerful, but for graduate engineers, for junior engineers, ah, t…”
Brendan HumphreysJun 20, 2025▶ 34:57Inside a $3B ARR Rocketship — Canva CTO Brendan Humphreys on Deploying AI at Scale
Opinion
Canva's proprietary design data uniquely positions it to build foundation models
“So maybe that advice of kind of like, don't be in the foundation, foundational model Space is good general advice, but we think that we are in a quite unique position in terms of the data that we have to pursue that particular avenue.”
Brendan HumphreysJun 20, 2025▶ 43:13Inside a $3B ARR Rocketship — Canva CTO Brendan Humphreys on Deploying AI at Scale
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins aims to build the world's most valuable company
“So Mel, ah, has a two-step plan for Canva, which is to create the world's most valuable company, and then do the most good in the world that we can.”
Brendan HumphreysJun 20, 2025▶ 53:16Inside a $3B ARR Rocketship — Canva CTO Brendan Humphreys on Deploying AI at Scale
Disclosure
Canva built an internal implementation of the Model Context Protocol
“We have our own model context protocol that we've stood up just in internally, ah, and we're certainly talking to the big vendors about, ah, interactions there that are possible.”
Brendan HumphreysJun 20, 2025▶ 24:45Inside a $3B ARR Rocketship — Canva CTO Brendan Humphreys on Deploying AI at Scale
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Dedicated AI engineers will eventually become obsolete like database administrators
“We think that, you know, once upon a time in software teams, you'd have a DBA on the team, but now a DBA is not really a skill anymore because everyone, that the abstractions above databases are such that you don't really need that deep skill unless you're dea…”
Brendan HumphreysJun 20, 2025▶ 28:10Inside a $3B ARR Rocketship — Canva CTO Brendan Humphreys on Deploying AI at Scale
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