Cursor

“Like you could make a strong case that AGI is basically already here. The majority of the tasks that, you know, 98% of knowledge workers do day-to-day it is now possible for a software engineer probably sitting in front of cursor, to write something that gets …”

“Yeah, we surveyed the summer 24 founders, and half the batch is using Cursor, compared to only 12% that's using GitHub Copilot.”

“The vibe started to shift back in summer 24 when cursor was being used by a big portion of the batch. And now, by far, is the leader.”

“Yeah, I think the number one reason that people are switching is that cursor today largely needs to be told what files to look at in your code base. So if you have a large code base, you can tell what to do, but you have to tell it like where to look in the co…”

“Developer tools are power tools, right? Developer tools by definition allow you to get to the bare metal, right? To get under the hood of what it, whatever it is you're working with. And so the teams that built these tools allowed me Full access to have this a…”

“It's basically every profession I think will have its cursor moment or its windsurf moment.”

“When I use tools like Cursor and Windsurf to build software with AI, it feels like the most powerful tool I've ever used, right? It's this feeling of being able to create anything I want, anything I can picture in my head you know, will materialize in front of…”

“There's a company in the current batch called Den, basically building cursor for knowledge work. That's trying to chain together all of these different MCP servers, which basically a way to call tools for agents.”

“They recently hit a nine billion dollar valuation and are one of the fastest growing startups of all time, reaching a hundred million dollars ARR just 20 months after launching.”

“We actually initially started by building our own editor from scratch, obviously using lots of open source technology, but not, you know, basing it off of VS code, kind of like how browsers are based off of Chromium. It was a little bit more akin to building, …”

“And then, you know, one thing I will note kind of harkening back to a last response is that even if you had something you could talk to that was human level at coding, Or faster and better, better than a human at coding, you know, sort of the skill of an entir…”

“One of the siren songs involved in building AI products is optimizing for the demo. We were really nervous about optimizing for the demo because with AI, it's easy to kind of take a couple of examples and put together a video where, you know, it looks like you…”

“Now in Cursor, we do over half a billion model calls per day on our own inference.”

“And I think rules of thumb around don't grow headcount more than 50% or year over year. Yeah. Have to be broken, I think.”

“And I think that the game in the next six months to a year is to make both of those, you know, an order of magnitude more useful.”

“For us, the main activity metric we looked at, or the, yeah, the main top line metric we looked at revenue. We looked at paid power users measured by, are you using the AI four or five days a week out of seven days a week? And that was the number we were tryin…”

“You know, on average, we see about people using, you know, having AI write 40%, 50% of the lines of code produced within Cursor, but it's still a process of, you know, reading everything that comes out of the AI.”

“Yeah, the goal with the company is to replace coding with something that's much better.”

“So for interviewing, we actually still interview people without allowing them to use AI other than autocomplete for our first technical screens.”

“One of the things that characterize search, and I think also characterize our market, is distribution is really helpful for making the product better. And so if you have lots of people using your thing, you have an at scale business, you get a sense of where t…”

“I think that it was from lines of code to first public beta release, it was three months. But then there was this year of iterating in public at very small scale where we had, did not have lightning in the model.”

“They're quite literally prohibiting the students from learning the tools that they are going to need in the future.”

“We've seen crazy growth unlike anything, only possible with, right now with AI, like all these companies that we work with, zero to twelve million in 12 months. The cursor story where they went zero to one in one year, the next one to a hundred. This is, like,…”

“We made it mandatory to use at least one AI coding tool, and internally at perplexity it happens to be cursor and like a mix, mix of cursor and GitHub Copilot. But yeah, we definitely made it compulsory.”

“Claude code seems to be far smarter than, like, what Cursor is able to do.”

“I really don't think of Cursor as a competitor. I think of them as someone that, I mean, we just launched our MCP server to explicitly make it so that you can get your designs into Cursor and Winsurf and all these other, and VS code, you know, all these great …”

“I remember in 2023, I think it was maybe single digit percentage of the batch we used cursor, then 2024, it was like 80%.”

“I think we ended. 2023 at only single digits people. Like we were less than 10 still.”

“You went from zero to one million around twenty-twenty-three, right? And it was, ah, it took a lot to get there, right? Yeah, it was a bit more than that, but sort of roughly that.”

“The first real idea that we worked on for a long time was in mechanical engineering. It was trying to build a co-pilot for mechanical engineers and trying to train models to kind of predict what you would do in a CAD system like SolidWorks or Fusion three 60 w…”

“Of our early user base, if you just kind of followed the gradient of exactly what they wanted, you would get pulled in slightly different directions than we ended up in. You know, we had a really loud segment of users that didn't know how to code at all, and w…”

“I think that there are probably some markets where you're really well served by going and immediately talking to a bunch of people, listing down their problems really rigorously, or, you know, really kind of systematically and exhaustively thinking through eac…”

“We thought that, you know, VS Code had been developed over the course of 12 years, was one of the earliest TypeScript projects had lots of people on it. Thought, oh yeah, of course, you can kind of spin something up that's just equivalent for the world in, in …”

“It took us Roughly, I think, three months from first line of code to open it up and GA it.”

“And I think we took a step back and realized that if we were being really consistent with our beliefs, you know, there was going to be an opportunity for all of coding to change in the next five years and for all of software development to flow through models.”

“Today, Repl.agent often creates a feature and then later on Break, breaks that feature, but also true of cloud code and cursor and all the others.”

“It's like, it's 20 bucks a month, it's 50 bucks a month, but we know that in 10 years from now, they'll probably be able to drive down their raw materials lower, but we won't be able to command lower prices for those things, because it's just like within a rea…”

“But you do want to control, like you don't want to show too many things at once where, Like it just becomes like a wall of text. You want to control like, ah, the things that are running, you show them in the more like focusable spot. And as it progresses, it …”

“I started working with James the founder, CEO of Command, as well as Wade our engineering leader to figure out how do we train the organization on AI, and then we came up with an AI week, and unfortunately for a bunch of reasons, we weren't able to actually do…”

“There are some products that you can adopt without selling and that like people just, you know, they have single player mode, you know, cursors, a great example. Slack's a great example. But there's some where you need to convince multiple people at the same t…”

“Like I think cursor takes an approach where they actually do semantic search, where they embed everything and figure out like, Hey, what query is closest to this? If you look at a codex or a cloud code they actually just use like grep.”

“Like thinking about a cursor or a cloud code or a codex CLI, the fact that you can just download it and use it without having to get IT permissions or anything makes a huge difference.”

“I use the cursor bug bot has gotten quite good and I actually like codex for code review as well. I find it does a very good job on correctness.”

“Our customer success manager, who's entirely non-technical, but interfaces with enterprise customers on a day-to-day basis, now gets to take on feature requests, especially the simple ones, directly give them to Cursor, a Cursor agent, and then directly be abl…”

“CLI seems to be becoming the right UX for agents. This is why I think going back to ClockCode versus Cursor ended up doing so well. It's just so much more freedom being fully on the command line.”

“We've got cloud code autonomously running in sandboxes all over NVIDIA, and that's really fantastic, and some people use codex, some people use cloud code, some people use cursor, some people use cognition, and we let kind of a thousand flowers bloom, let peop…”

“For example, Cursor is using it to train Composer on tens of thousands of Blackwell GPUs.”