Michael Truell
Co-founder and CEO of Cursor (Anysphere), as of 2025; mntruell.com now describes the work as building SpaceXAI. Studied CS and maths at MIT.
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What they believe
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The programmer should stay in the driver's seat for a long time, with speed, agency and control.
I think we’re really excited about a future where the programmer is in the driver’s seat for a long time. And you’ve heard us talk about this a little bit, but one that emphasizes speed and agency for the programmer and control.
lexfridman.comSaid 6 Oct 2024This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These one: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 8 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
The programmer should stay in the driver's seat for a long time, with speed, agency and control.
I think we’re really excited about a future where the programmer is in the driver’s seat for a long time. And you’ve heard us talk about this a little bit, but one that emphasizes speed and agency for the programmer and control.
Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #447 (transcript) Said 6 Oct 2024
In AI coding products, brand and moats matter less than continued innovation: stop innovating on the product and you lose.
I think in the end, just if you stop innovating on the product, you will lose.
Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #447 (transcript) Said 6 Oct 2024
The ceiling for AI coding products is very high: the best product in three to four years will be much more useful than the best one today.
I think that the ceiling here is really, really, really incredibly high. So I think that the best product in three to four years will just be soon much more useful than the best product today.
Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #447 (transcript) Said 6 Oct 2024
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The best engineering involves many tiny decisions about what exactly to build and hard trade-offs between speed and cost.
But I think a lot of the best engineering, the engineering we enjoy, involves tons of tiny micro decisions about what exactly you’re building, and about really hard trade-offs between speed and cost and just all the other things involved in a system.
Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #447 (transcript) Said 6 Oct 2024
This is a really exciting time to be building software, and programming today is more fun than it was in 2012 or 2013.
I actually think this is a really, really exciting time to be building software. We remember what programming was like in 2013, 2012, whatever it was. And there was just so much more cruft and boilerplate and looking up something really gnarly. And that stuff still exists. It’s definitely not at zero. But programming today is way more fun than back then.
Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #447 (transcript) Said 6 Oct 2024
As AI changes programming, people's taste and creative ideas will be magnified and boilerplate text editing will matter less.
I think that people’s taste and creative ideas will be magnified. And it will be maybe less, a little bit, about boilerplate text editing.
Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #447 (transcript) Said 6 Oct 2024
If AI builds more and more of a system, it needs to verify as well as generate, including checking its own code.
If AI is building more and more of the system for you, you need to not just generate but also verify. And without that, some of the problems that we’ve talked about before with programming, with these models will just become untenable. So it’s not just for humans like you write a bug, I write a bug, find the bug for me, but it’s also being able to verify the AI’s code and check it is really important.
Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #447 (transcript) Said 6 Oct 2024
Automatic context given to coding models should clear a high bar for accuracy and relevance, since more context makes them slower, costlier and more confused.
So the bar for accuracy and for relevance of the context you include should be quite high.
Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #447 (transcript) Said 6 Oct 2024
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Where they publish
Site mntruell.com His personal site.
A short page: what he is working on now, his background, and links to his accounts.
Link verified 11 Oct 2026.
x.com @mntruell His X account.
LinkedIn Michael Truell His LinkedIn profile.
GitHub truell20 His GitHub account.
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