Lee Robinson describes how issue-tracking software company Linear incorporates Cursor AI agents into their workflow to resolve customer bug reports.
Insight
Robinson: Linters and tests allow AI agents to self-correct autonomously
“Inside of this code base, which I can show in a second, I'm using TypeScript, I have a linter set up, I have formatting set up, I have tests,
And all of those things, the agent can read its own outputs and then just self-correct and fix itself without me havin…”
Insight
Robinson: Software builders eventually need to inspect code as abstractions peel back
“From what I've seen, you kind of reach a point where eventually you kind of have to look at the code and it's going to make your life a lot easier as you start to figure out how the code works. You don't need to be an expert but you can start to kind of tune t…”
Insight
Robinson: Engineering is shifting to distribution as building products gets easier
“In the past I've talked about how front end and back end went to more product engineers. You were caring a lot more about the product. And now that product is becoming easier and easier to build, there is something here to this distribution angle where, okay, …”
Insight
Robinson: Start fresh AI coding chats per task to optimize context windows
“It's important that you're making new chats or new conversations for each kind of discrete task, because every single time you're giving context to the model, you can see here, it was about 17% of the context window. This is like kind of like the maximum worki…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Robinson: AI-assisted software builders and artisanal hand-coders will coexist
“There's going to be a ton of people who build software and can build products. And then there's also going to be people who, you know, artisanally write code by hand every day and don't use AI and that's the thing that they love, and that's also valid. I think…”
Insight
Robinson: Zero marginal cost coding enables disposable custom debugging interfaces
“The other thing that I've seen that's amazing when the marginal cost of writing software is zero, when coding is easy, when coding, you can just generate a bunch of code. There are certain types of things you can build that previously you would just never do t…”