The Future of Software Development: Cursor's Vision for AI-Powered Programming

The Vision for Programming After Code

Michael Tru, co-founder and CEO of Cursor, has a bold vision for the future of software development - a world beyond traditional coding. Cursor aims to invent a new type of programming that is vastly more productive and accessible than current methods.

Tru explains: "Our goal with Cursor is to invent a new type of programming, a very different way to build software. So a world kind of after code." He envisions a future where building software is distilled down to simply describing your intent to the computer in the most concise way possible.

Rather than writing lines of code in formal programming languages, Tru believes software development will evolve to be more about specifying how you want the software to work and look at a high level. He states: "I think that more and more being an engineer will start to feel like being a logic designer and really it will be about specifying your intent for how exactly you want everything to work."

This represents a profound shift from current software development practices. Instead of engineers needing to think in terms of JavaScript, Python, and other programming languages, there will be an abstraction layer that allows describing software logic more like English sentences or pseudocode.

However, Tru emphasizes that this evolution will still keep humans firmly in control:

"We think it ends up looking like that. And we're very opinionated that that path goes through kind of existing professional engineers and it looks like this this evolution away from code. And it definitely looks like the human still being in the driver's seat, right? and the human having both a ton of control over all aspects of the software and not giving that up."

So while AI will dramatically change how software is built, Tru believes engineers will remain essential for defining the logic and intent behind applications. The key is empowering them with much higher-level tools and abstractions.

Skills for the Future of Software Development

As software development evolves beyond traditional coding, the skills that will be most valuable for engineers are likely to shift as well. Tru highlights a few key areas he believes will become increasingly important:

Taste and Design Sense

Tru predicts that taste will become a more crucial skill, encompassing both visual design and logical design of how software should function. He explains:

"I think taste will be increasingly more valuable and I think often when people think about taste in the realm of software they think about you know visuals or taste over smooth animations and UI UX etc on kind of the visual design of things and I think more and more and you know the visual side of things is an important part of defining you know a piece of software but then as mentioned before I think that the other half of defining a piece of software is is the logic of and how the thing works."

Engineers will need to develop strong instincts for designing elegant, intuitive software experiences and architectures.

High-Level Logical Thinking

Rather than getting bogged down in low-level implementation details, Tru believes engineers will focus more on high-level logical design:

"I think that more and more being being an engineer will start to feel like being a logic designer. And really it will be about specifying your intent for how exactly you want everything to work. And it will less be about it be more more about the the what and a little bit less about the how exactly you're going to do things under the hood."

The ability to think abstractly about software architecture and logic flows will become even more important.

Creativity and Innovation

As AI handles more of the rote coding work, human engineers will be freed up to focus on creative problem-solving and innovation. Coming up with novel solutions and pushing the boundaries of what's possible will be key.

Communication and Collaboration

With software development becoming more high-level and abstract, clearly communicating ideas and collaborating effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders will be crucial.

Adaptability and Continuous Learning

As the field evolves rapidly, engineers will need to constantly adapt and learn new tools, frameworks, and ways of thinking about software development.

While deep technical skills will still be valuable, Tru's vision suggests a shift towards engineers who can operate at a higher level of abstraction and bring a more holistic set of skills to software creation.

The Origins of Cursor

The story of how Cursor came to be provides fascinating insight into the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Tru explains that Cursor started as a "solution in search of a problem" - the founders were excited by the potential of AI but weren't sure exactly how to apply it.

Two key moments sparked their interest:

1. Using the first beta version of GitHub Copilot, which Tru describes as "the first time we had used an AI product that was really really really useful."

2. Reading research papers from OpenAI and others showing how AI models would continue improving simply by scaling up their size and training data.

This got the founders excited about the possibilities, but they initially decided to avoid the crowded space of AI coding tools. Tru recalls:

"We actually worked on you know we sort of did this whole grand exercise and we decided to work on you know an area of knowledge work that we thought would be relatively uncompetitive and sleepy and and boring and you know no one no one would be looking at it because you know we thought oh coding's great you know coding is totally interchangeable because AI but you people are already doing that."

So for the first four months, they actually worked on tools for mechanical engineering instead. However, they ran into challenges with that domain and eventually "came to our senses" as Tru puts it.

When they looked back at the coding space, they realized that despite the passage of time, not much progress had been made. Tru explains:

"We looked around and in the area of programming it felt like you know despite you know a decent amount of time ensuing not much had changed and it felt like the people that were working on the space maybe had a 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 kind of all of software creation was going to blow through these models."

This realization set them on the path to building Cursor. They saw an opportunity to be more ambitious and push the boundaries of what was possible with AI-assisted coding.

The lesson here is that sometimes the most crowded, competitive spaces are actually where the biggest opportunities lie - if you can bring a truly innovative approach. Tru and his co-founders saw that existing solutions weren't being ambitious enough in reimagining the future of software development.

Cursor's Approach: An AI-Enhanced IDE

In developing Cursor, Tru and his team had to decide between several possible approaches to AI-assisted coding:

1. Building an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for engineers and adding AI capabilities to it
2. Creating a fully AI-powered development agent
3. Focusing solely on building the best possible coding model

They ultimately chose to build an AI-enhanced IDE. Tru explains the rationale behind this decision:

"We care about giving humans control over all the decisions in kind of the end tool that they're building and I think those folks were very much thinking of a of a future where kind of you know end the whole thing is done by AI and maybe like the AI is making all the decisions too."

Cursor's approach keeps humans "in the driver's seat" while dramatically enhancing their capabilities with AI. This aligns with their belief that programming will evolve but not be entirely automated away.

Tru also notes that building their own IDE gives them the flexibility to radically change the programming experience as AI capabilities advance:

"If you think that the UI is going to change a lot, if you think that the form factor of programming is going to change a lot, you necessarily need to have control over the entire application."

This approach allows Cursor to reimagine the entire software development workflow rather than being constrained by existing IDE paradigms.

Custom AI Models: A Key Differentiator

One of the most surprising and important aspects of Cursor's approach has been the development of custom AI models. Tru admits this wasn't part of their original plan:

"We definitely didn't expect to be doing any of our own model development when we started. As mentioned, you know, when we when we got into this, there were companies that were immediately from the get-go going and just focusing on kind of training model from scratch. And we had done the calculation for what it took to to train GP4 and just knew that that was not going to be something we were going to be able to do."

However, they discovered that custom models were crucial for delivering the best possible user experience:

"At this point every magic moment in Cursor involves a custom model in some way and it's it's been a gradual thing where you know there was an initial use case for for training our own model where it really didn't make sense to use any of the biggest foundation models that was incredibly successful kind of moved to another use case that worked really well."

Some key areas where Cursor uses custom models include:

1. Autocomplete: Cursor's autocomplete is powered by specialized models that can predict not just the next token, but entire sequences of code changes across multiple files. These models need to be extremely fast and cost-effective to run constantly.

2. Code search: Custom models help find the most relevant parts of a codebase to show to larger language models.

3. Code generation: While large language models do the high-level thinking, custom models help fill in implementation details quickly and efficiently.

Tru emphasizes that they're pragmatic about when to use custom models versus existing foundation models:

"We try try to be very pragmatic about the places that we're going to do this work and we don't want to reinvent the wheel and so starting from the the very best pre-trained models that exist out there often open source ones you know sometimes in collaboration with these big model providers that that don't share their weights out into the world."

This hybrid approach of leveraging both custom and foundation models allows Cursor to deliver a uniquely powerful development experience.

Tips for Using Cursor Effectively

For developers looking to get the most out of Cursor, Tru offers two key pieces of advice:

1. Break tasks down into smaller chunks: Rather than trying to have the AI tackle large, complex tasks all at once, Tru recommends:

   "I would bias less toward like hey trying to have the model like you know trying in one go to tell the model hey here's exactly what I want you to do then seeing the output and then either being disappointed or accepting the entire thing for an entire big task. Instead what I would do is I would chop things up into bits and you can spend basically you know the same amount of time specifying things overall but chopped up more."

   This iterative approach allows for more control and better results.

2. Experiment to discover the AI's capabilities: Tru encourages users to push the boundaries of what the AI can do, especially in side projects:

   "I would encourage people to explicitly try to fall on their face and try to discover the limits of what these models can do by, you know, being ambitious in like kind of a a safe environment, like perhaps a side project and and trying to kind of go hand to use AI to the fullest because, you know, sometimes we do run or a lot of the time we run into people who haven't given the AI yet a fair shake and are kind of underestimating its abilities."

The key is to develop an intuition for what the AI is capable of and how to guide it effectively. This "gut feeling" may need to be recalibrated as new model versions are released with expanded capabilities.

The Impact on Junior vs. Senior Engineers

An interesting question is whether tools like Cursor benefit junior or senior engineers more. Tru sees benefits for both groups, but notes they tend to fall into different patterns:

Junior Engineers: "The junior engineers we see going a little too wholesale relying on AI for everything and we're not yet in a place where you can kind of do that end to end on a professional tool you know working with tens hundreds of other people within a long codebase."

Junior developers may need to be cautious about over-relying on AI and ensure they're still developing fundamental skills and understanding.

Senior Engineers: "By and large I would say on average as a group the senior engineers underrate what AI can do for them and stick to their existing workflows."

Senior developers may benefit from pushing themselves to explore how AI can enhance their productivity and tackle problems in new ways.

Tru notes that the "sweet spot" may be engineers in the middle - experienced enough to use AI tools judiciously, but open-minded enough to fully embrace their potential.

The Future of Software Development

Looking ahead, Tru paints a picture of a profound, multi-decade shift in how software is created:

"I think we're in the middle of a technology shift that's going to be incredibly consequential. I think it's going to be more consequential than the internet. I think it's going to be more consequential than, you know, any shift in tech that we've seen since since the advent of computers and I think it's going to take a while and I think it's going to be a multi-decade thing."

He emphasizes that this transformation will require progress on multiple fronts:

1. Advancing the underlying AI science and capabilities
2. Reimagining user interfaces and workflows for AI-assisted development
3. Integrating AI into specific domains and types of knowledge work

Tru believes companies that can successfully combine cutting-edge AI technology with thoughtfully designed product experiences for specific areas of knowledge work will be "really really really consequential" in shaping the future.

While the pace of change may sometimes seem dizzying, Tru advocates for a balanced perspective - recognizing the profound impact AI will have while also understanding that fully realizing its potential will take time:

"I think it's going to take decades. I think that there's going to be lots of amazing work to do."

For software developers, this means incredible opportunities ahead, but also the need to continuously adapt and evolve their skills. The future of programming may look very different from today's world of text editors and formal languages, but human creativity and logic will remain at the core of software creation.

As AI reshapes the landscape of software development, tools like Cursor are at the forefront of exploring what's possible and pushing the boundaries of human-AI collaboration in building the digital world of tomorrow.

Article created from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En5cSXgGvZM