What is design at Cursor? Design at Cursor right now is four people, including myself. Two people focus on the product, one person on the brand. But a lot of, like almost all the engineers at Cursor are also kind of designing. Or like people start building stuff. and as they build they're like actually designing the system maybe like they care less about the visuals how things flow at one point but they're still thinking about it they're building it and now my job is how do I kind of wrangle things back how do I clean it up how do I unify the concepts so that things stay cohesive it is a lot more chaotic but that makes it more fun

And then you're trying to keep the system clean at every layer of abstraction. From how people perceive it visually to how it's modeled to how things scale to what are the core ideas. And they all kind of are tied together. I imagine that this way of working shapes the kind of people you bring to Cursor, you hire. What are those people like and how are they different from other startups? What do you look for to kind of tease out their qualities? Yeah, I feel like a lot of us are like generalists, super ICs, ex-founders. Like people have a lot of self-agency and skills to kind of just do the thing. And they're like less worried and they're good collaborators. they don't care about boundaries or process or bureaucracy we have this big problem maybe i'll focus on the parts that i care most about that i'm good at maybe for myself as like the concepts the visuals how things fit the engineers can think about the architecture and and stuff. And then we used to not have PMs. Now we do, but they're like, they're just found, you know there are certain things that I good at So I just come and then we work together together on the same material which is code And it doesn really matter It's like the old ways of doing things is more each discipline does their own thing in their own little world with their own language tools. And then you try to stitch things with like artifacts and processes. like the PM writes a PRD, runs meetings, shares the things out. The designers mix the mocks, the pixels, with the concepts that maybe that is not theirs. The engineers take whatever that's broken down from all of this and then just do little tickets. When they should probably think about how do I architect it better and make a scale more, They should also have some fun. So all of these people are so disjoint. They all use separate tools. They all talk differently. What the fuck are we doing? Versus we're all like software builders. Some of us might be good at words or pixels. We're like actually really good at coding. And you just put these people together, give them like a big and kind of vague problem. might be seemingly impossible if framed in a more traditional tech company context. But then here it just happens because you give these people agency.

In this context, you are building Cursor within Cursor. There's something intensely recursive about that, right? And so it creates this quality of dogfooding that's very unique. To people who are unfamiliar with that way of working, how do you kind of describe it to yourself? How do you describe it to others? Yeah, I think it's like a lot of us, maybe we think of us as we're just like doing software for a job versus you're actually building something that you really care about. What's the difference? If you want to do something you really care about, you just need to be constantly in it. You start from building things for yourself, your own pain points, your own habits, to make yourself happy, to build something that flows well with how you think. Then it gets a little bit bigger. It's like now you're solving problems for people like you. In the context of Cursor, everyone who started Cursor, they were just software engineers. They loved programming. They loved making tools. And that's how they started. They needed something that fits the AI better, that takes advantage of all the things the models have, put them with coding Like what is the right interaction What is the right way to do the thing now They started there They built the thing for themselves And then they kept doing that because they care. And now you get like more people around who also care. And you don't treat it as "I need to wait for the ticket to arrive to get assigned, then I do something. Once I'm done, I don't care because I can't really use the product myself. I can't make the connection even". When this thing is something so core to us, we use it almost every hour, every second, both to make Cursor and also just to have fun too. A lot of us, we started from building side projects. One of our engineers, Ian, he used cursor to build like a 3d like minecraft thing in the browser i used it to like make my own personal os just for fun just to play with it just to feel it then we use this feeling we use all the things we observe that we hate about thing to make it better and you just keep doing it. So the tool gets better. You also get better. Like you're now more capable, you can do more things. And as you do that, you improve the tool and it's like a self improving loop. Once the agent is able to do this by themselves, it will be even faster.

If you look at each piece of software at the conceptual level, usually there's not that many things in there. Say like TikTok is just like a feed of videos, auto looping. The user, all they do is they go to the next one. Notion is blogs, pages, databases. But once you kind of combine these things, it can give a rise to emergent complexity. People can do whatever. The simpler the core set of things, the easier they can combine. When you treat, say, like a lot of people, when they do products, they think, ah, this is my group of users that I care about. I'll figure out what are their problems. Maybe I found 20 problems, but I decide to focus on one problem. And I just make one thing. See, my concepts entirely are based on that one problem. And I make my whole thing out of it. It just won't scale. It won't be as flexible. When now it's like, with AI, Because the models are themselves general purpose. They have read the whole world, all the public information knowledge, all the repositories on GitHub Then the thing itself truthfully it is not something specific just for this group of people just for programmers just for coding even The tool should ideally fit you, how you think, your preferred input, like input method. So like, we as designers, we love pictures. Yes. We think in 2D space, sometimes I draw like little boxes to convey my ideas. Sometimes it's like a high fidelity mock. Your PMs are just like doing their specifications, setting the constraints in text, but longer, not like a short chat prompt. And then the coders, maybe they're like, they're also building some prototype, trying to set their idea. You can actually unify all of these different inputs. And then you can also create an interface because we're like an interface that adapts to people that is not stuck. and what the designer had in their mind for that one specific problem. The interface can adapt. It changes based on what you do, based on who you are. If you're a single person, if you're working with a team, with a big team, the kind of things you do, the piece that you care about, the form that you prefer. Like if you like the terminal, you like doing CLI stuff, that's fine too. I think it's fine. or maybe you're on the phone, I'm just checking out, like I have some random idea, I want to kind of just try it out. That works too. But they all talk to the same agent, the same underlying structures.

And if you look at history, back in the days or the earlier days, nobody thinks of themselves as, I'm just a designer. Or I'm just like a programmer. I guess everyone were like a programmer in some sense. They kind of do the whole thing. So then what will be the shape of the new designer in this paradigm? Because I feel so like, again, I think of you as the original vibe coder. Yeah. When that term was coined and took root. Right. I know who that is. They're describing Rio. Yeah. It's him. It's like, if you're a designer who thinks designing is just drawing buttons and inputs and making marks and maybe like building design systems, you're like a little fucked in a sense that I think even like the models today, they kind of solved a lot of the problems on, say, implementing these things or even like now the image models can come up with like pretty good mocks. Then what do we do Then what is important What important is actually you need to help people around you and help yourself like see the thing in this like truest form both like say for now in the present and in the future what could it become what are the things in there what are the parts of it which parts do I need to change? What do I need to tweak? Right. But that happens also like at every layer. Maybe you're tweaking the visuals, changing the brand perception, reorganizing the product concepts, updating the flows to reuse the new patterns that we created. And you need to kind of do it. Right. Yeah. So you might do it through storytelling, through code, through pictures. Depends on who you work with. Like some engineers that I work with, they just love mocks, so I make them. But some people, maybe they're like, they actually just want to explore themselves, come up with a few options, like prototype themselves. Then I'll be like, this one is cool. This one, maybe you should merge them. We keep revving on.

I noticed some vibe coders actually do the agent stuff better than some of the more manual coders who haven't caught up yet. Yeah. Because they've built so much with it, they've formed some intuition on, ah, this is how I should break down my prompts and this is the size of problem this model is good at. Because you have to build, have to use it to learn that.

Designers often ask me, what tools should I be learning in this new AI paradigm? And we know all the current tools and the new ones that are emerging. But maybe the answer is cursor. Why is the answer cursor from your perspective? I think a lot of the other tools are maybe a little too opinionated, too siloed in their layer. Oh, interesting. Say more about that. So like Figma, you're like stuck in the pixels. maybe the V0 lovables, they're also kind of boxing you up in the safe area. Whereas like, if you do stuff within that area, it gives you, say, maybe slightly better output. Yeah. But once you go beyond that, you can't. But cursor, how I want to kind of shape it towards, I don't want to force you to do things in a certain way. If you have found your way, you can keep doing it. yeah if you haven't you can find your way it's like I don't want the tool to be stuck as a code editor because it's no longer