Aman Sanger: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. We'll talk about that in your Llama 2 piece. And then the final big opinion that you drop in there was you must write your own IDE as opposed to write a VS Code extension, which there's plenty of them out there. SourceGraph is doing one and I've been working closely with Morph, which just put out Rift. So this is obviously a big undertaking. Maybe explain more a little bit about why build your own IDE. Yeah. The reason we decided to do this is I think in the future, today, what Cursor can provide and what any of these tools can provide isn't that much different than, I guess, what you get in VS Code. But it was more of a long-term decision where in the long term, you're going to need to design just a very different UX that the extensions don't give you. One story we'd heard is that with Copilot, in order to actually get the multi-line ghost text implemented, it wasn't actually a part of the extension. I think the team at GitHub had to call up VS Code and have them make a change to the source in order for that extension API to be enabled. That's what allows for multi-line ghost text completion. And this is scary. If you look today, there are other things that VS Code in their source code has enabled as APIs that are just closed off to everyone but Copilot. So I think there's this fundamental platform risk where you're competing with the incumbent that owns the platform you're building on. And we thought it would just not really be tenable in that sense. And then the other thing is if you want to do other kind of fancy things. So one example of a feature we're kind of building right now is instead of just... So Copilot is great for completing the next line, completing the next few lines, but what if you wanted to do a kind of sort of edit, where instead of just completing this line, it changes the line above or delete something. There's no way that you can do something like that in VS Code, but we have the UI for this that we've kind of built out in Cursor. We're currently training models in order to get it to work well. But again, this is a feature that we think once we get it to work, will be quite useful. Could be on par with Copilot level in terms of usefulness. And it's just fundamentally impossible unless you own the IDE. There are a lot of other ones like those that we're kind of cooking up. And then there are small things. I do think like in terms of inline edits, which means inside the editor, you can press command K in Cursor and then ask for some kind of modification of the code or ask for a generation of the code. And I do think we have probably the best UX for that because if you look at what someone like Sourcegraph does, I mean, Sourcegraph code is a great product, but they basically have to use the GitHub pull request comment feature in order to do it. And I think like these paper cuts kind of add up over time. They do. And it's very impressive how quickly you can try it out, you know, obviously encourage everyone listening to try out Cursor. And the download is really quick. The binary is super small. And then when you spin it up, it boots up really fast. And it's just a text file that guides you through the tutorial. It's really, it's really great.…

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