Truell: Cursor bans AI tools during its initial software engineering technical screens
Michael Truell · Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters · Y Combinator · Jun 11, 2025 · at 32:58
Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Anysphere (maker of Cursor), reveals Anysphere's hiring process for engineers during an interview with YC's Garry Tan.
0:00 / 0:08exact quote · 8.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So for interviewing, we actually still interview people without allowing them to use AI other than autocomplete for our first technical screens.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Michael Truell
Truell: Cursor's ultimate goal is to replace traditional coding entirely
“Yeah, the goal with the company is to replace coding with something that's much better.”
Truell: Software creation will move to higher abstraction levels within a decade
“We think that over the next five to 10 years, it will be possible to invent a new way to build software that's higher level and more productive. That's just as still down to defining how you want the software to work and how you want the software to look.”
Truell: 'Vibe coding' doesn't work for large professional codebases
“I think that the whole idea of kind of vibe coding or coding without really looking at the code and understanding it doesn't really work. There are lots of end order effects. You know, if you're dealing with millions of lines of code and dozens or hundreds of …”
Truell: AI coding tools will become 10x more useful within a year
“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.”
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…”