Michael Truell
speaker
105 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 14 Nov
Michael Truell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
I think this is maybe not the sexiest area that the Silicon Valley companies are building in.
One, it's very difficult.
You have to get integrated with companies very closely.
We partner with large private equity firms and large enterprises in these industries to really learn their workflow.
Yeah, I think the question is about does that contractor, a solo contractor or maybe a few people, do they need AI today, right?
I think in that type of small business level, if anything, capacity and labor, being able to go take on more jobs is the more problem than maybe investing the small capital you have to AI tools.
This is why we actually started with more mid-market and large enterprises because they're at a point that they can invest for more growth with AI tools versus not.
I did not, but I got to listen to him in D.C.
when he was talking for the AI executive order, and I was front row and loved that he talked about this type of jobs because I think we need to encourage the young people to go into skilled labor a lot more as AI does displace job in more computer-backed, maybe small, menial task areas.
These are the jobs that are not replaced for the next hundred years.
So the code editor is largely the place where you build software. And today, or for a long time, that's meant the place where you text edit a formal programming language. And for people who aren't programmers, the way to think of a code editor is like a really souped-up word processor for programmers, where the reason it's souped up is code has a lot of structure.
And so the quote-unquote word processor, the code editor, can actually do a lot for you that word processors sort of in the writing space haven't been able to do for people editing text there.
And so that's everything from giving you visual differentiation of the actual tokens in the code so you can scan it quickly, to letting you navigate around the code base, sort of like you're navigating around the internet with hyperlinks. You're going to sort of definitions of things you're using, to error checking to catch rudimentary bugs.
And so traditionally, that's what a code editor has meant. And I think that what a code editor is is going to change a lot over the next 10 years as what it means to build software maybe starts to look a bit different. I think also a code editor should just be fun.
Like fundamentally, I think one of the things that draws a lot of people to building stuff on computers is this like insane integration speed where, you know, in other disciplines, you might be sort of gatecapped by resources or the ability, even the ability, you know, to get a large group together and coding is this like amazing thing where it's you and the computer and that alone, you can build really cool stuff really quickly.
Okay. So what's the origin story of Cursor? So around 2020, the scaling loss papers came out from OpenAI. And that was a moment where this looked like clear, predictable progress for the field, where even if we didn't have any more ideas, it looked like you could make these models a lot better if you had more compute and more data.
So around that time, for some of us, there were a lot of conceptual conversations about what's this going to look like? What's the story going to be for all these different knowledge worker fields about how they're going to be made better by this technology getting better?
And then I think there were a couple of moments where the theoretical gains predicted in that paper started to feel really concrete. And it started to feel like a moment where you could actually go and not do a PhD if you wanted to work on, do useful work in AI. Actually felt like now there was this whole set of systems one could build that were really useful.
And I think that the first moment we already talked about a little bit, which was playing with the early bit of Copilot, that was awesome and magical. I think that the next big moment where everything kind of clicked together was actually getting early access to GPT-4. So it was sort of end of 2022 was when we were tinkering with that model. And the step up in capabilities felt enormous.
And previous to that, we had been working on a couple of different projects. We had been because of Copilot, because of scaling Oz, because of our prior interest in the technology, we had been tinkering around with tools for programmers, but things that are like very specific.
Showing 21–40 of 105 · page 2 of 6
← Previous
Next →