Michael Truell: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. Okay. I'm going to come back to these topics, but I want to actually zoom us back out to the beginnings of Cursor. I have never heard the origin story, I don't think many people know how this whole thing started. Basically you guys are building one of the fastest growing products in the history of the world, it's changing the way people build products, it's changing careers, professions, it's changing so much. How did it all begin? Any memorable moments along the journey of the early days? Cursor kind of started as a solution search of a problem, and a little bit where it very much came from reflecting on how AI was going to get better over the course of the next 10 years. There were kind of two defining moments, one was being really excited by using the first beta version of Code Pilot, actually. This was the first time we had used an AI product that was really, really, really useful, and was actually just useful at all, and wasn't just a vaporware kind of demo thing. And in addition to being the first AI product that we'd use that was useful, Code Pilot was also one of the most useful, if not the most useful dev tool we'd ever adopted, and that got us really excited. Another moment that got us really excited was the series of scaling on papers coming out of OpenAI and other places that showed that even if we had no new ideas, AI was going to get better and better just by pulling on simple levers, like scaling up the models, and also scaling up the data that was going into the models. And so at the end of 2021, beginning of 2022, this got us excited about how AI products were now possible, this technology was going to mature into the future. And it felt like when we looked around, there were lots of people talking about making models, and it felt like people weren't really picking an area of knowledge work and thinking about what it was going to look like as AI got better and better. And that set us on the path to an idea generation exercise, it was like, "How are these areas of knowledge work going to change in the future as this tech gets more mature? What is the end state of the work going to look like? How are the tools that we use to do that work going to change? How are the models going to need to get better to support changes in the work? And once scaling and pre-training ran out, how are you going to keep pushing for technological capabilities?" And the misstep at the beginning of Cursor is we actually worked on... We sort of did this whole grand exercise, and we decided to work on an area of knowledge work that we thought would be relatively uncompetitive, and sleepy, and boring, and no one would be looking at it, because we thought, "Oh, coding's great, coding's totally going to change with this AI, but people are already doing that. " So there was a period of four months to begin with, where we were actually working on a very different idea, which was helping to automate and augment mechanical engineering, and building tools for mechanical engineers. There were problems from the get-go in that. Me and my co-founders, we weren't mechanical engineers. We had friends who were mechanical engineers, but we were very much unfamiliar with the field. So there was a little bit of a blind man and the elephant problem from the get-go. There were problems around, how would you actually take the models that exist to today and make them useful for mechanical engineering? tle bit of a blind man and the elephant problem from the get-go. There were problems around, how would you actually take the models that exist to today and make them useful for mechanical engineering? The way we netted out is, you need to actually develop your own models from the get-go. And the way we did that was tricky, and there's not a lot of data on the internet of 3D models of different tools and parts, and the steps that I expect to build up to those 3D models, and then getting them from the sources that have them is also a tricky process too. But eventually what happened was, we came to our senses, we realized we're not super excited about mechanical engineering, it's not the thing we want to dedicate our lives to. And we looked around, and in the area of programming, it felt like despite a decent amount of time ensuing, not much has changed, and it felt like the people that were working on the space maybe had a disconnect with us, and it felt like they weren't being sufficiently ambitious about where everything was going to go in the future, and how all of software creation was going to blow through these models. And that's what set us off on the path to building Cursor.…

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