Michael Truell: prediction

Transcript context

…When we were chatting earlier, you had this really interesting phrase, this idea of what comes after code. Talk about that, just the vision you have of where you think things are going in terms of moving from code to maybe something else. Our goal with Cursor is to invent sort of a new type of programming, a very different way to build software, that's kind of just distilled down into you describing the intent to the computer for what you want in the most concise way possible, and really distilled down to just defining how you think the software should work, and how you think it should look. With the technology that we have today, and as it matures, we think you can get to a place where you can invent a new method of building software that's [inaudible 00:05:16] higher level, and more productive, in some cases, more accessible too. And that process will be a gradual moving away from what building software looks like today. I want to contrast it with maybe the vision of what software looks like in the future that I think... A couple of visions that are in a popular consciousness that we at least have some disagreement with. One is, there's a group of people who think that software building in the future is going to look very much like it does today, which mostly means text editing, formal programming languages, like TypeScript, and Go, and C, and Rust. And then there's another group that kind of thinks you're just going to type into a bot, and you're going to ask it to build you something, and then you're going to ask it to change something about what you're building, and it's kind of like this chatbot, Slackbot style where you're talking to your engineering department. And we think that there are problems with both of those visions. I think that on the chatbot style end of things... And we think it's going to look weirder than both. The problem with the chatbot style end of things is that lacks a lot of precision. If you want humans to have complete control over what the software looks like, and how it works, you need to let them gesture at what they want to be changed in a form factor that's more precise than just, "Change this about my app. " In a text box, removed from the whole thing. And then the version of the world where nothing changes we think is wrong, because we think the technology is going to get much, much, much better. And so a world after code, I think that it looks like a world where you have a representation of the logic of your software that does look more like English, you have written down... You can imagine in [inaudible 00:07:08] form, you can imagine in kind of an evolution of programming language towards pseudocode. You have written down the logic of the software, and you can edit that at a high level, and you can point at that. And it won't be the impenetrable millions of lines of code, it'll instead be something that's much Terser, and easier to understand, easier to navigate. But that world where the kind of crazy, hard to understand symbols start to evolve towards something that's a little bit more human-readable, and human-editable, is one that we're working towards. This is a profound point. I want to make sure people don't miss what you're saying here, which is that what you're envisioning in the next year essentially is kind of when things start to shift, is, people move away from even seeing code, having to think in code in JavaScript and Python, and there's this abstraction that will appear, essentially pseudocode, describing what the code should be doing more in English sentences.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.