Cursor CEO: Going Beyond Code, Superintelligent AI Agents, And Why Taste Still Matters

Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, joins Garry to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all time—and why he's betting on a future beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led his team to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written. From years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters (Powered by https://ChapterMe.co): 00:00 - Intro 01:00 - A new way to build software 02:00 - Cursor’s mission 03:40 - The downside of vibe coding 04:50 - Two ways to view LLMs 05:50 - Bottlenecks to superhuman agents 08:30 - New approaches to coding UI 09:40 - Why taste still matters 12:15 - Niche software opportunities 13:30 - Cursor origin story 16:00 - The first problem they tried solving 17:20 - Why they abandoned the CAD idea 21:00 - Pivoting to Cursor 23:00 - Following the scaling laws 24:30 - Early product decisions 25:20 - The GitHub Copilot origin story 27:00 - Getting to PMF 30:00 - “Dogfooding” 31:00 - First 10 hires 32:50 - How to evaluate great engineers in age of AI 33:45 - Maintaining the hacker mindset as you grow 35:00 - What are the moats for AI coding tools? 37:00 - Looking ahead