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Michael Truell

14 statements across 2 episodes · 7 bullish · 2 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Jun 11, 2025 by Michael Truell · across every show →

On the record as a speaker too: Michael Truell's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.

Everything said about Michael Truell, oldest first

Jun 11, 2025 neutral
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Truell: OpenAI's original Codex model cost roughly $100,000 to train
“Is we did the back of the envelope math for what Codex, the first coding model, costed to train. From my memory, it only cost about 90 K or a hundred K by our calculations.”
Michael Truell Jun 11, 2025 ▶ 20:50 Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters · Y Combinator
Jun 11, 2025 neutral
Disclosure
Truell: Cursor originally built a custom editor before forking VS Code
“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, …”
Michael Truell Jun 11, 2025 ▶ 26:25 Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters · Y Combinator
Jun 11, 2025 negative
Insight
Truell: Chat text boxes are fundamentally too imprecise for controlling coding AI
“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…”
Michael Truell Jun 11, 2025 ▶ 8:04 Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters · Y Combinator
Jun 11, 2025 negative
Opinion
Truell: AI labs face a severe shortage of high-quality long-context training data
“I think that there's a dearth of really good long context data available to the institutions that are training these models.”
Michael Truell Jun 11, 2025 ▶ 7:04 Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters · Y Combinator
Jun 11, 2025 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Truell: Cursor processes over 500 million daily model calls on custom inference
“Now in Cursor, we do over half a billion model calls per day on our own inference.”
Michael Truell Jun 11, 2025 ▶ 19:43 Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters · Y Combinator
Jun 11, 2025 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Truell: AI models will mediate all programming, requiring complete UI control
“All of programming is going to flow through these models. It's going to look very different in the future. You're going to need to control the UI.”
Michael Truell Jun 11, 2025 ▶ 25:04 Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters · Y Combinator
Jun 11, 2025 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Truell: Computer use and log inspection are essential for future AI coding
“But so computer using is kind of, is going to be important for the future of code. Being able to run the code, being able to look at data dog logs and interface with those tools that humans use.”
Michael Truell Jun 11, 2025 ▶ 7:46 Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters · Y Combinator
Jun 11, 2025 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Truell: AI will eliminate the manual 'human compilation' step of programming
“And so I think that more and more of that, like, human compilation step will go away, and computers will be able to kind of fill in the gaps, fill in the details.”
Michael Truell Jun 11, 2025 ▶ 10:34 Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters · Y Combinator
Jun 11, 2025 positive
Insight
Truell: Human taste in product logic will remain irreplaceable despite AI advances
“We think that one thing that will be irreplaceable is taste. So just defining what do you actually want to build? People usually think about this when they're thinking about the visual aspects of software. I think it's also, there's a taste component to the no…”
Michael Truell Jun 11, 2025 ▶ 9:43 Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters · Y Combinator
Jun 11, 2025 neutral
Disclosure
Truell: Cursor launched in three months, then iterated for a year pre-PMF
“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.”
Michael Truell Jun 11, 2025 ▶ 27:18 Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters · Y Combinator
Jun 11, 2025 positive
Insight
Truell: Working on-site beats hundreds of user interviews for vertical AI startups
“And looking back on the time we spent on that, I think it would have been better up front to actually just go work at a company that was employing Mechanical engineers for three weeks.”
Michael Truell Jun 11, 2025 ▶ 18:04 Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters · Y Combinator
Sep 3, 2025 neutral
Assertion Supported
Truell confirms Cursor reached roughly $1M in revenue around 2023
“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.”
Michael Truell Sep 3, 2025 ▶ 19:50 Michael Truell: Building Cursor At 23, Taking On GitHub Copilot & Advice To Engineering Students · Y Combinator
Sep 3, 2025 neutral
Disclosure
Truell: Cursor resisted vocal early user demand to target non-programmers
“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…”
Michael Truell Sep 3, 2025 ▶ 18:58 Michael Truell: Building Cursor At 23, Taking On GitHub Copilot & Advice To Engineering Students · Y Combinator
Sep 3, 2025 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Truell: All Software Development Will Flow Through Models Within Five Years
“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.”
Michael Truell Sep 3, 2025 ▶ 11:36 Michael Truell: Building Cursor At 23, Taking On GitHub Copilot & Advice To Engineering Students · Y Combinator
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