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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
And there was sort of a mirror situation with this, with some of the large language model providers, and also this is speculation, but some of these APIs used to offer easy access to log probabilities for all the tokens that they're generating, and also log probabilities for the prompt tokens. And then some of these APIs took those away. And again, complete speculation, but...
One of the thoughts is that the reason those were taken away is if you have access log probabilities, similar to this hidden train of thought, that can give you even more information to try and distill these capabilities out of the APIs, out of these biggest models, into models you control. As an asterisk on also the previous discussion about us integrating O1.
I think that we're still learning how to use this model. So we made O1 available in Cursor because when we got the model, we were really interested in trying it out. I think a lot of programmers are going to be interested in trying it out. But O1 is not part of the default cursor experience in any way yet.
And we still haven't found a way to yet integrate it into the editor in a way that we reach for sort of every hour, maybe even every day. And so I think the jury's still out on how to use the model. And we haven't seen examples yet of people releasing things where... It seems really clear, like, oh, that's like now the use case.
The obvious one to turn to is maybe this can make it easier for you to have these background things running, right? To have these models in loops, to have these models be agentic. But we're still discovering.
So it's a time to shut down cursor. I think this space is a little bit different from past software spaces over the 2010s, where I think that the ceiling here is really, really, really incredibly high. And so I think that the best product in three to four years will just be so much more useful than the best product today.
And you can wax poetic about moats this and brand that, and this is our advantage. But I think in the end, just if you don't have, if you stop innovating on the product, you will lose. And that's also great for startups. That's great for people trying to enter this market because it means you have an opportunity to win against people who have lots of users already.
By just building something better. And so I think, yeah, over the next few years, it's just about building the best product, building the best system. And that both comes down to the modeling engine side of things. And it also comes down to the to the editing experience.
Doing the human form of verification where you just do manual quality control.
I think we're really excited about a future where the programmers 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, the ability to modify anything you want to modify, the ability to iterate really fast on what you're building. And
This is a little different, I think, than where some people are jumping to in this space, where I think one idea that's captivated people is, can you talk to your computer? Can you have it build software for you as if you're talking to an engineering department or an engineer over Slack? And can it just be this sort of isolated text box? And part of the reason we're not excited about that
is some of the stuff we've talked about with latency. But then a big reason we're not excited about that is because that comes with giving up a lot of control. It's much harder to be really specific when you're talking in the text box.
And if you're necessarily just going to communicate with a thing like you would be communicating with an engineering department, you're actually abdicating tons and tons of really important decisions to this bot. And this kind of gets at fundamentally what engineering is.
I think that some people who are a little bit more removed from engineering might think of it as, you know, the spec is completely written out and then the engineers just come and they just implement. And it's just about making the thing happen in code and making the thing exist. 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, you know, speed and cost and just all the other things involved in a system.
And we want, as long as humans are actually the ones making, you know, designing the software and the ones specifying what they want to be built, and it's not just like company run by all AIs, we think you'll really want the human in a driver's seat. dictating these decisions. And so the jury's still out on kind of what that looks like.
I think that one weird idea for what that could look like is it could look like you can control the level of abstraction you view a codebase at. And you can point at specific parts of a codebase that maybe you digest a codebase by looking at it in the form of pseudocode. And you can actually edit that pseudo code too, and then have changes get me down at the sort of formal programming level.
And you keep the, like, you know, you can gesture at any piece of logic in your software component of programming. You keep the inflow text editing component of programming. You keep the control of, you can even go down into the code. You can go at higher levels of abstraction while also giving you these big productivity gains.
And there are a lot of details to figure out there that's sort of like a fuzzy idea. Time will tell if it actually works. But these principles of control and speed in the human and the driver's seat, we think are really important.
We think for some things, like Arvid mentioned before, for some styles of programming, you can kind of hand it off chatbot style, you know, if you have a bug that's really well specified. But that's not most of programming. And that's also not most of the programming we think a lot of people value.
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